Recently bagged Sports Diver: What next?

[Paulo]

Do 100 dives before Xmas 2018. That will give you enough in water time in a short enough timeframe to have the situational awareness that you need to progress.

Just enjoy being in the water. If you want badges join the boy scouts

[Wardy_uk]

Do 100 dives before Xmas 2018. That will give you enough in water time in a short enough timeframe to have the situational awareness that you need to progress.

Just enjoy being in the water. If you want badges join the boy scouts

never really got on in the scouts...

its nothing to do with badge collecting - I enjoy developing skills and learning new ones

re the comments above re B&T - since dive 1 in the pool I've strived for the best B&T I can achieve... obv it looks good but Ive known from the start its the key to being able to everything else well... long story short, I did B&T at the start of this year....

[Mikael]

did 25m earlier this week, and only stopped for a few seconds...

For depth progression spending time at each increment is important vs doing something more akin to a bounce dive. If you spend more time at any given depth you'll build experience of how comfortable you feel there, how your real world gas consumption compares to that you calculated when planning the dive and how quickly your no decompression time runs down. The comfort thing also needs to be tested as you perform various tasks such as navigating, sticking to your dive plan, staying close to your buddy, using underwater signals, catching a lobster, sending up a DSMB,.. etc. By doing these things you may also start to appreciate that ever present but deceptively in background nitrogen narcosis you are suffering. This is important, especially if you are getting into boat diving onto wrecks or reefs where the dive profile will naturally tend to me more square.

No doubt your instructor said all of this but worth repeating.

[Allan Carr]

I know some SD's with over 1000 dives under their belt although they qualified before the current depth limit for SD's was imposed so deep dives are not in breach of the rules. DL is as was said above more about leading less qualified divers but is a necessary step if you want to move on to AD which has a lot of extra skills.

[Paulo]

I can't believe that it is me that is suggesting this but ......


Have you considered doing Fundies? I think you may just be the ideal candidate, keen, motivated, eager to learn and new enough to be easily moulded

[Wardy_uk]

given serious consideration to fundies early next year. I'm looking at getting a twinset later this year, so want to sort that first - then possibly fundies or equivalent...

[jturner]

given serious consideration to fundies early next year. I'm looking at getting a twinset later this year, so want to sort that first - then possibly fundies or equivalent...

Quick question and a thought! Firstly, why do you want to start using a twinset? Nothing wrong with doing that, just there's no need to do so unless you really need all that gas or just want to! A single 15L and a pony will go a long way.

Secondly, if you are thinking of considering Fundies, I'd suggest that you do that first and borrow a twinset from your Fundies instructor and let them teach you how to use it: you pay a lot for that course so get as much from it as you can. It will make the course a bit harder but you can learn the GUE style and methods from day 1 rather than learning one skillset then doing another straight afterwards. At the very least, consider borrowing a GUE-style twinset if you want to play with one first then it will be familiar... given the Frankenstein clustersets that you can see at many inland sites, it's probably a good idea. Twinsets are not hard to use but the setup is more subtle and important than you might imagine.

[John63]

An ideal candiate for one of the GUE experience days I would have thought.

[Wardy_uk]

Quick question and a thought! Firstly, why do you want to start using a twinset? Nothing wrong with doing that, just there's no need to do so unless you really need all that gas or just want to! A single 15L and a pony will go a long way.

Secondly, if you are thinking of considering Fundies, I'd suggest that you do that first and borrow a twinset from your Fundies instructor and let them teach you how to use it: you pay a lot for that course so get as much from it as you can. It will make the course a bit harder but you can learn the GUE style and methods from day 1 rather than learning one skillset then doing another straight afterwards. At the very least, consider borrowing a GUE-style twinset if you want to play with one first then it will be familiar... given the Frankenstein clustersets that you can see at many inland sites, it's probably a good idea. Twinsets are not hard to use but the setup is more subtle and important than you might imagine.

greater redundancy, coupled with longer bottom time. I'm currently diving with single 15 on my back, and when the need arises, a staged 7 - giving me a max of 22l, so close to the 24 I'd get from twin 12's

do I *need* the twinset approach, possibly not, but the more I dive, the more I'm likely to be diving with other twinset divers (currently its about 50/50 I'm either diving with someone in twin 12's or someone on a single 12) so - to me at least - switching to twin 12's makes the most sense - and it would be with a "DIR" type setup, again for consistency.

[Wardy_uk]

An ideal candiate for one of the GUE experience days I would have thought.

yep - working on that... the last two run locally fell on days I couldn't make... just waiting for @Badger to arrange another one at Stoney

[Badger]

let me look at some dates again

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[johnkendall]

If you're interested in fundamentals, then I'm running a class based out of Nottingham in October, with one space on it. The other two participants are in single tank, so there will be a very recreational bias to the class, and I would think would suit you well with your experience.

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[scuba]

I've got 40 dives under my belt in total, with an in water time aproaching 30hrs

I'm more interested in longer dives than deeper, so am currently diving a 15l single with a 7l stage to extend bottem time

Do you know what you SAC rate is? If you have needed a 7l with a 15l on dives where you have been restricted to 20m max unless you have had exceptionally long dives I would leave the next course for a while and concentrate on getting comfortable in the water, which will in itself reduce your air consumption rate. Get very comfortable with the kit you have before thinking about moving to twins.

Do you do two dives in a day? If you do having twins won't help as you will be reducing the amount of air you have available to you.

[Wardy_uk]

SAC's around 18-20

Like the twin set i dont *need* the 7, its there for redundancy, and extra long dives

[MikeF]

Go diving and forget further training. Learn to enjoy diving not learning to dive.

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this. too many people think diving is about training and doing the next course and the next course. once they've done all the courses they give up because there's 'nothing left to challenge them'. big mistake.

there's a reason you're club mates are saying just go diving for now. get out there and use what you've learned to have fun.