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I guess that I'm also a charter member of the SCUBA fight club. I took the YMCA's eight week survival (SCUBA) course in 1973. The instructor was ex US Navy. There were 16 students who started the course. At 16 years old I was the youngest. The oldest student was 24. There was one female student because her boyfriend was Chris, the son of the owner of Harry's Dive Shop. We did endless swimming and snorkeling laps of the Olympic pool at the Metarie, Louisiana YMCA. I guess the conditioning lasted all of two weeks after the end of the course. Yes, the divemasters harrassed us when we were in the water. This was thought to be necessary to "weed out those unfit for diving". It just weeded out those who couldn't tolerate being harrassed. I remember that four of us at a time jumped into the deep end of the pool and took off all of our gear. We did an unescorted free acsent to the surface while a divemaster stirred up our four sets of dive equipment on the bottom. We had to jump in, go down, sort out our equipment, and put on the correct equipment before we could all come up. I can see the dive industries insurance companies having a collective heart attack if we proposed these training standards now. Of the 16 students only 12 finished the course. For the dropouts SCUBA became "too hard" in reality for the dream that they had nurtured for years. It was really a shame. In today's diver training environment any one of these young, fit, previously enthusiastic drop outs would be an Instructor's dream student who would breeze through a beginner SCUBA course. Our two checkout dives were on a scrap of coral reef out of Destin, Florida. I think we went twice to 95 feet. In my first 10 dives I don't think we didn't dive any shallower than 65 feet. I know that 6 of the first 10 dives in open ocean were to 90+ feet, two were cave dives to 100+ feet and two were nighttime cave dives deeper than 60 feet. We all had a watch, a depth gauge and a copy of the US Navy tables. Some of us had pressure gauges, some of us had "J" valves. We had 65 or 72 cubic feet of air in steel tanks and we didn't have BCDs. We had "Mae West" vests for emergency surface floatation. We had a lot of fun. We planned our dives and dove the plan. We were divers. On the boat after my second dive I saw a guy who had been diving without a watch, depth gauge or pressure gauge get bent. He had a painful shoulder joint hit and right arm paralysis after his second dive. He had a diving license and had been trained but he wasn't a diver. HE WAS AN IDIOT! Today with scientific training methods, fabulous equipment, computer assistance, and detailed technical knowledge free for the asking, WE STILL HAVE IDIOTS! Don't call them divers no matter what their license says. Idiots who dive come from all training environments and all training organizations. Idiots even come from all areas of human endeavor. If idiots choose to exercise their right to ignore the rules when diving on their own, you can't blame the training organization that tried so hard to teach good rules. Anyone who has been around the world and kept their eyes opened sees good people everywhere and bad people everywhere. Good and bad is a function of the individual's free choice OR the perception of the observer and not automatically of any race, religion, nationality, government, occupation, education or diver training organization. You seriously damage your own credibility when you PUBLICALLY attack another person who dives (even if they are an idiot) and you render your own credibility null and void when you take on an entire diver training organization. If you freely advertise your own status as an intolerant, prejudiced, bigot on a medium like the internet you have to be AN INTERNET IDIOT concerning public etiquette and good manners. You have no credibility. You waste bandwidth. You in the diver chat networks and bulletin boards know who you are. Do the vast silent majority AND YOURSELVES a great favor. JOIN US!
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