DO YOU LOOK AS GOOD UNDERWATER AS YOU LOOK ON PAPER OR PLASTIC?

DO YOU LOOK LIKE THE DIVER THAT ANYONE ELSE WOULD WANT TO BE?

WHO REALLY WANTS TO LEARN:

"Buoyancy Control SKILLS"

Most divers are in such a hurry to collect c-cards and to buy fancy dive gear and to score bragging rights that they allow the proverbial cart to get in front of the horse. 
SO FAR....fundamentals such as Buoyancy Control have managed to not become an "ego trip" or attract very much attention from most of the diving community. Perceived STATUS is more important than actual competence with fundamental skills.

WE "ONLY" MENTOR FUNDAMENTAL SKILLS.

POLICE & FIRE DEPT. UNDERWATER RECOVERY TEAMS

 Public Safety Diving

We can offer you FUNDAMENTAL DIVE TRAINING that is not ego based or testosterone driven.

We can’t promise you ice diver training, underwater evidence collection or body recovery skills. What we offer is less spectacular & more useful than that.

We can show you what you don’t know: Exceptional Buoyancy Control Skills and Frog Kick. You know..... two of " the many fundamental skills" that you just skipprd over on your path to glory.  Skills that you are unlikely to go back to collect on your own. Y

Frog Kick is a good alternative propulsion method that doesn’t obliterate the environment where you are operating.  WE OFFER BASIC CAVE DIVER FUNDAMENTALS! Not a cave diver course, just the basic skills needed to show up for a cave diver course. The skills that more than half of the candidates (most of whom are instructors) do not have when they arrive for their first cave class. Yes__ it is a disgrace! So is a public safety dive team with only beginners dive talent__or less.r

How do we know you don’t already have those skills?.............   "Call it a hunch!” 

Does every Public Safety Dive Team have a drill instructor type guy with a crew cut or a shaved head and a roll of duct tape? You know who we mean; the guy who invents the macho stunts that may or may not have any reference to the duties that the team members will be called upon to perform. He’s the guy who uses the tape to cover the AGA full face mask in order, we presume, to simulate zero visibility. We know a thing or two about real zero viz! The lack of light in a cave is total. The guy with the tape looks nothing like a DIVER with exceptional skills, underwater, and he knows it, so he invents macho stuff ( all wind and smoke ) with which to stroke  his ego and that of the dive team.

We worked as instructors for a dive center for about 9 years. A dive center that was fortunate enough  to benefit from a very large percentage of the annual budget of a state police dive team and a large metropolitan recovery team. We had an opportunity to observe the behavior and listen to the bluster. “We train our own personnel.” is a common sentiment. That’s code for: “We’re the elite!” Elite__maybe? Dedicated public servents__perhaps?  But good fundamental divers with good buoyancy skills__NOT LIKELY! AND___NOT LIKELY to return to first base any time soon. YES it is about "EGO"!

 

That was a decade ago, so in order to be fair we paid a visit to You Tube to see if we might get current with what the training might look like now. We figured that reasonable people wouldn’t publish video evidence of their skills on the internet unless they were proud.
We saw more duct tape on full face masks and watched some mask removal drills and equipment removal skills played out in a pool with knees and elbows banging into the bottom but without any hint of buoyancy control. Our personal favorite has to be the recovery of a PVC car from a pool. If you view  this video try to imagine a real car and a silty bottom. Then see if you think these two "Over Equipped" and "Under Skilled" divers might be the reason for "ZERO VIZ"!  It wasn’t that exceptional buoyancy control was missing.......passable buoyancy control was absent as well. In fact, we saw nothing that could be labeled as buoyancy control period.
Talk about being in too much of a hurry & never touching first base!!!!  These guys are so negative that they are constantly pushing off the pool bottom with one hand. Very dramatic music though....most people might not even notice how bad the divers are. These people need a scholarship to a fundamentals course somewhere!

We visited some websites that promote Public Safety Diver Training. Some were recreational agencies offering training adapted to Public Service Diving while others claimed to be dedicated exclusivly to dive teams. All placed the emphisis on equipment. Not one mention of buoyancy control or other dive fundamentals. We have no commercial diving experience but we question the wisdom of too much commercial gear,  applied to Public Safety Diving, without the support of any foundation skills. We have cave diving experience and it has taught us that "over equipped/underskilled divers" constitute a formula for trouble, if not disaster. That is not an agency observation....it is a personal one. Most divers never touch first base. Few dive instructors are in a position to require fundamental skills from others without exposing themselves to scrutiny.
There are never enough toys to replace fundamental skills and without a strong foundation even the most elaborate creations will topple. Dry suits, pony bottles, AGA masks and the rest of the paraphernalia that is routinely worn by public safety divers, is a poor substitute for fundamental dive skills. Expensive or elaborate equipment neither creates nor identifies a diver who has ability.E

There was too much gear in all of the videos that we saw.
Too much sophisticated communications equipment, too many pony bottles and few, if any, personal skills. We believe personal skills trump equipment and that talent needs to precede ambition and braggadocio!

Public Safety Divers must often operate in silt and  poor visibility  but how often is that poor viz the result of their own hopeless buoyancy control skills?

We recognize that Public Safety Diving is a noble profession and that it can involve personal risk, coupled with hardship and unpleasantness. We have, unfortunately, known some individuals who measure personal dive status by the number of bodies that they have recovered. It should come as no surprise that we can not endorse  that attitude and we do not equate those feats with any measurable level of true dive skills.

We also recognize that Public Safety Diving is both voluntary and coveted. Developing noticeable fundamental skills rather than false bravado should be the priority of a volunteer..........who spared no effort or expense to gain his position.

The question that public safety divers should  ask themselves is not: "Would anyone else want to have my job?" The question that they should ask is: "Am I the... DIVER... that... anyone else... would like to be?"

Who do we think we are?
WE NEVER: pretend to be more than we are and we....
.... just want to be your "FIRST BASE COACH"

LEARNING BETTER BUOYANCY CONTROL SKILLS CAN BE: