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Anyone scuba??


jamesrb90
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Thinking of doing my scuba next year instead of skydiving guys gals

Need do one of them lol

Is it a really expensive Hoby? Is the gear and all that?? I follow a few people on instagram that do it and my god the picture are stunning!!! I'm into fish and I certainly love to see some wrecks.

anyone got any info on doing my padi

Thanks

James

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It can be expensive, but it is cheapish to hire especially until you know exactly what you want.


In the UK it is murky and greeny grey a lot of the time but there are some amazing wrecks about.


Padi is good and easily recognised, you start off in a classroom and then a swimming pool before being taken out in a small group.


It is a different world under the waves :)

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It can be expensive, but it is cheapish to hire especially until you know exactly what you want.


In the UK it is murky and greeny grey a lot of the time but there are some amazing wrecks about.


Padi is good and easily recognised, you start off in a classroom and then a swimming pool before being taken out in a small group.


It is a different world under the waves :)

Nice one.

Yeah I really want to go abroad and do most of it.. best water quality really.

I am looking faward to it especially the wrecks and all.

That's good to know once I get my padi I can rent the gear..

Have you dived alot?

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I did it once. A 3 day beginners course in turkey 20 years ago. Absolutely cacked it!!!! And I was and still are breathing apparatus trained. Mates who had no experience of BA took to it like a fish to water if you pardon the pun...

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best way to start is by joining your local dive club.. its BSAC. in Cheshunt. if its like any other dive club, they organise group dives both here in the UK and abroad.. once you've passed the test, which usually takes place in a local pool. also it gives you access to quality second hand gear from people who you will get to know.. and most importantly: trust. most people buy certain items and hire the rest. things like Mask, wetsuit, flippers, regulator, dive computer etc etc. being part of a club means its a lot easier to make informed decisions.



http://www.bsac.com/PopupClubDetails.as ... opout=true


Just like PADI. BSAC is recognised worldwide. and is a basic requirement for hiring gear.. regardless of where you go.

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Do it! It's one of the best things I've ever done. Can be expensive at first but just hire the bits you need and slowly build up your kit if you decide it's something you want to keep doing.


I really don't like doing it in the UK though. Cold water, can't really see much...it gets boring.

Though being able to get to places where the water isn't always like that is also an expensive business :lol:.

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Dude, just get on with it!


I love it but can't do it as much as I want because the dorris didn't take to it. :-( That's why I just hire gear as and when I need it (mainly on hols). It can get quite expensive doing it that way and I've found dedicated dive holidays get a bit samey after a few days so tend to work a couple of dive days in when I'm away.


I hugely recommend doing your PADI open water abroad. I did it in Cambodia (Scuba Nation in Sihanoukville), it was really well run, ultra cheap and the best waters/fish/general sea life I've ever seen.


Taster sessions are really cheap if you can get one on Groupon or something.


Sky diving works out quite expensive compared to scuba - there's a lot of training up-front to get independence. I gave it up quite early on because of the expense and general "there's a cloud, no jumping today" thing. Plus you get loads more time actually doing it.


I want to go diving now, thanks a bunch!

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Great stuff guys.. looking faward to it. Ain't gona bother now in this cold


Love the idea of going on holiday and slipping away from the bird to scuba

 

swimming pools in general aren't all that cold.. most have flash electrickery that heats them up. to my mind.. doing your initial training in the winter.. in a local swimming pool is definitely the way forward. your local BSAC club offers try dives.. why not give one a go?

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I packed it in a couple of years ago and sold all my gear because I got fed up of floating around in cold murky green water when I could have been building Lego spaceships with my boys :D


After PADI Rescue Diver I went down the GUE route. It's a very different, team-based approach to diving, born out of the cave exploration community in Florida. You don't have to have any desire to dive caves to benefit from the training, and their minimalist approach to kit will also help reduce the expenditure on shiny accessories. They have some top-notch instructors in the UK.


You'll see plenty of BSAC people slagging PADI and vice versa. Take no notice: I trained with both and the standards are broadly similar.


Enjoy!

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PADI is a business.


BSAC is a club... so the fees are yearly membership and local fees that pay for the hire of the pool and so on. training is inexpensive. as there's no profit motive involved.


Most people who start diving do so while on holiday and thats almost exclusively with PADI. and then remain with PADI once back home mainly due to inertia.


The level of training is very similar. you just need to decide which type suits you best. PADI which is kind of 'pay as you go' or BSAC which revolves around club membership. both have pros and cons.

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I loved it, haven't been for a long time but diving here in Spain is just fantabadoosie. Most resorts will have a PADI school and take you through the basics. I did my training in Estartit, the diving off that coast is some of the best I have experienced. Do it, you will love it! :)

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This is a photo of me (looking at a small pike, if memory serves) that shows the GUE kit configuration: everyone you dive with in the GUE system will look exactly the same, which means everything is standardised, and everything is located and works in exactly the same way. You'll normally dive in a team of three, and all of this makes underwater problem-solving much easier. They also spend a lot of time working on finning techniques, which is only covered in a very basic way in PADI/BSAC. You'll become totally proficient in finning forwards, backwards, and doing helicopter turns using only your fins - all very cool when you're poking around in tight spaces.


I started with PADI and then went over to GUE, simultaneously joining my local BSAC club for the pool time. If I had had the chance I would have started with GUE, but horses for courses - they'll all get you enjoying the underwater experience quickly and safely enough.

image.jpg.49a5f1f9f72a1b05714ebed3f409d7fe.jpg

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Hi, both me and my son (al-stu) are qualified divers, I did mine with NAUI, an american group but internationally recognised with some schools in this country. The big advantage to me of NAUI (and BSAC) against PADI is that you cant do your training in a couple of days. With PADI you are shown how to do the basics and the safety routines, have a quick practise, show the teacher you can do it, get a tick and thats it. Next time you try may well be a year down the line 20m underwater, and your life may depend on it. My total training time in the pool was about the same as with a PADI course, but every week started with the safety routines, and its every week for 6 weeks, by which time you've got it, then you get tested and its no problems, it sticks. On my 2nd dive in the sea the idiot following me jumped straight in onto my head and kicked my mask off and the regulator out of my mouth - I coped, would a PADI diver have done so? I've dived abroad and been paired with a PADI trained "advanced " diver, and ended up having to bring him up on shared air. BSAC is the best training but takes a long time compared to PADI, NAUI is a good compromise.


I love diving, its a different world, very relaxing and peaceful, but gave up diving around these shores in favour of nice warm clean seas elsewhere. My wife hates water so nowadays I get the occasional holiday diver using rented equipment, but I still have loads of kit if you do take it up, we may be able to haggle a deal if you fancy it.


Best moment - last dive of a week long diving trip on a boat out of Sharm el Shaikh, I'm mooching around the bottom just using up the last of my air a couple of hundred yards of the main beach, I look up and there's a guy on the surface watching me. I waved, he waved back, but he cant come down to join me. Very smug feeling he he he .

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Thanks alot guys I really appreciate your advise and thoughts..

So BSAC is a diving qualification like padi or a diving club? Sorry for the new bish question lol.

And yes If I do buy my gear ot wpuld probably be used [FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY] just incase it don't get used after a while. As iv made this mistake alot in past hahah.

But yeah ill try get onto a BSAC if iv understood this. As I only thought it was padi. Maybe do my lessons befor summer and that'll alow me to go abroad to finish it all

Thanks guys

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I've been involved with a couple of PADI schools: one was very much of the box-ticking type, the other was a first-rate outfit that really took their time to develop your skills and proficiency. They're not all the same by any stretch of the imagination. By the same token I've dived with plenty of BSAC divers - instructors included - that are just underwater accidents waiting to happen. I even saw one instructor jump in without turning her gas on and hit the bottom like a stone. As I mentioned earlier, I trained with PADI and BSAC and there's not a great deal of difference between them in terms of the required standards - they just get you there by slightly different routes.


Like lots of recreational divers, I thought my skills were pretty good: I had an extensive collection of cert cards and was perfectly comfortable dealing with just about anything underwater - free-flowing regs, torn drysuit at depth, o-ring blow-outs, out-of-gas or panicking divers - all dealt with without any dramas. Then I went on a GUE experience day. The level of proficiency these guys demonstrated made PADI and BSAC look hopelessly amateurish in comparison. I ditched PADI on the spot and signed up for GUE training and never regretted the decision, even though it entailed selling every bit of dive gear I owned and purchasing a complete set of more appropriate kit.


I maintained my BSAC membership during my preliminary GUE training, but parted company with them shortly afterwards due to their stuffy and inflexible approach to better ways of doing things. The debacle over hog-rigging was a prime example, with BSAC refusing to acknowledge a configuration that is hands-down safer and better than the conventional short-hose alternate air supply configuration. What I liked about GUE was that everything they did was thought out very carefully and logically and had to work flawlessly in high-pressure real-world situations. BSAC just did things because that's the way they'd always done them.


The GUE style of diving (also known as Doing It Right, or DIR) is sometimes criticised as being elitist, and in fairness the personalities of some of the early American pioneers didn't do much to endear it to a mass audience. But that has changed enormously, and all the instructors I've met in the UK, without exception, have been excellent educators and top blokes. If and when my kids want to learn they won't be going anywhere near PADI or BSAC, it will be GUE all the way.


I'm not evangelising on behalf of GUE, it's just that for me personally, had I known about them at the outset (and had they had an entry-level course at the time) I would have saved myself a lot of time and expense messing around with the two mainstream training agencies. If the OP wants to know any more about GUE there's a forum (DIRx) and plenty of Youtube videos showing the training methods and the proficiency levels. The training is a lot harder and more involved than PADI/BSAC, but the rewards in terms of underwater comfort, competence and efficiency are well worth the effort.

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Very interesting Mark...


I'll be honest when I say my PADI card is now just a pass to hire gear. I did open water and immediately had every intention of doing all the courses - I haven't done a single one! When I lived in Kent I had a couple of dive buddies and we'd just nip along, get our kit and do what we wanted. There's not a lot you can't learn by having a read and putting things in to practice.


This was mainly due to the high prices of the PADI courses and blindingly obvious all day "learning" sessions which were, frankly, mind numbing.


GUE sounds like it'd be worth a look - just my cup of tea. :-)

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I don't think you've missed out by not doing the PADI specialities to be honest, because most of them are pretty noddy: Quick drop to 40 metres, look at a squashed pop bottle that was full at the surface, congratulations - you're now a certified Deep Diver. Same with the Diver Propulsion Vehicle course: jump in, fire the scooter up, terrorise a load of open water students and then home for tea and medals.


GUE do have one or two funny ideas though - they won't train smokers, for instance, which always struck me as a bit daft. The argument was that they expect a very high level of physical fitness from their students, and yet I know several smokers who are a damn site fitter than me! But the biggest wrench for me going over to GUE was having to abandon my beloved dive computer! I had a great unit with a transmitter on the cylinder to give me my gas pressure, but that had to go. Instead you have a depth gauge and a bottom timer and calculate your decompression schedule in your head using ratio deco. It sounds horrendous, but it's actually a really simple method that eliminates reliance on computer software.


Let me know if you want more info and I can pass on the contact details for your local GUE instructor. They are all good guys. :)

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I've never had a computer, only the card thing!


Talking of smokers, on my final open water dive my PADI instructor beat me to the surface by about a minute. When I bobbed to the top he already had a fag in his mouth and was being passed a glass of pastis by one of the boat hands. :-)


Out of interest, do you dive with a GUE group or with some chummies? Can't say I'd particularly enjoy being told what I can and can't do - just like the biking, it's about fun and doing something I get a thrill from, not an "I'm better than you because I follow the rules" type of thing.


Saying that though, I could use a nitrox qualification so I can get the gas...

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Yeah, I know where you're coming from there. I was probably one of their most awkward students - congenitally insubordinate and a total non-conformist!


Once you've got the gist of the GUE system you can dial it down a bit to suit yourself. For example, all recreational dives with GUE have to be nitrox dives. Now, if I was going to spend an hour bimbling around an inland dive site with a couple of mates there's no way I'd waste my money on nitrox, so I'd get an air fill and be done with it. I'd also happily dive with non-GUE guys as long as I was confident enough in their ability that they weren't going to get me killed.


I think in the early days GUE got a lot of people's backs up with their 'our way or no way' attitude, but they seem to have softened their stance since then. A couple of their top UK instructors are very laid-back guys who take a very pragmatic approach to diving. The key things you take away with you are the in-water skills and a mindset that is geared towards avoiding problems before they happen, and for dealing with them very efficiently if they do.


I don't dive at all any more - I jacked it in over 2 years ago because I got fed up with it. I never got the opportunity to dive abroad, and as my wife had no interest I was restricted to cold and murky UK diving at weekends, when I'd rather have been at home playing with the kids. :D

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