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Dan / Tom When I did my first Open Water course in '75 we had to endure all sorts of what would be considered macho stuff to get certified. My wife did her course a couple of years ago. She had to do a 200m swim in a pool. An overweight student was unable to complete this swim. He stopped every length of the pool for a few minutes, and only covered about 1/2 the required distance. The PADI instructor overlooked this as they now tend to focus on being kind and sensitive and ensuring everyone passes. I am sure this diver is diving happily, probably passed his PADI advanced by now. Apart from dodgey open water tests like this I have never really seen any systematic fitness assessments being carried out. Would it be unreasonable for IANTD or TDI to put some focus on a reasonable level of fitness assessment as part of more advanced dive courses like Extended Range, Trimix. E.G. (pulling this out of the air here) a 400 to 800m swim geared up with a time limit (You could even do a gas consumption calculation.) Or a medical with an ultrasound for PFO ? I think if we ever want to learn from accidents and improve training we have to cut all the rhetoric and ego "stroking", which is getting a little sickening here, do some objective analysis of root causes, and see if the training can reasonably be improved. Tom - does IANTD systematically analyse dive accidents for root cause and feed this back to training development ? Guy Wittig Sydney Australia -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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