Not really a DIR trip report, but kind of, and I hope some of you might be interested.
Each year my club (
www.cuueg.org.uk) take it's new trainees for their first taste of real diving (as in outside of a pool) to cornwall for a week, at the end of March. The dates are basically set by the University term times, and so we don't really get much say in it. This is why this year we ended up with pants weather and enormous tides. It is quite hard to balance DIR principles and BSAC training procedures, however I think I've now found a good middle ground. I am not going to go into any of the details of how I actually teach any of the skills, as there will always be someone out there who wants to have a dig, so instead I'm going to talk a bit about basic principles.
For a long time I've believed that if you can teach someone buoyancy control properly, then all the other skills are easy. We played around with this quite a lot this year, and I think that the trainees that have come through this year's scheme are the best I've seen. So roughly speaking this is how we break down our training:
Dive 1 - Buoyancy skills, We do nothing in this dive except float just off the bottom, swim around a bit, and get them to think about breathing (by getting them to take their reg out, and put it back in again)
Dive 2 - More Buoyancy, basically the same as Dive 1, just more time to practice what the students are told in the debrief
Dive 3 - More Buoyancy, start Mask clearing, start Reg swapping
Dive 4 - More Buoyancy, Full mask clearing and Remove/replace, Reg swapping, start AAS
Dive 5 - More Buoyancy, More mask Clearing, More Reg swapping (inc Mod S), AAS and AAS Ascents
Dive 5 - All of the above, plus start CBL (Grips, Mini lift, but not a full lift)
Dive 6 - All the above, plus Full CBLs
Dive 7 - Experience Dive, S-drill to begin with, then a dive with students leading, 2 minute stop at 6m on ascent.
This is basically what we did, however our first 2 days were blown out, and we swapped dives 6 and 7 (we had a boat for one of the days, so did Dive 7 off the boat)
Porthkerris is quite a good site for openwater training, it has a great fill station on site, it's relatively easy shore diving, but does still have some swell, tides and a surf entry/exit to add excitement. I'll try and put up some photos when I get a chance.
Good points about the trip: 12 out of 14 OD trainees are basically finished, 2 SD trainees are well on the way, and our DL trainees gained a whole load of experience
Bad points: 5 Instructors and 20 trainees doesn't really work, and I'm knackered now.
However it was a fun week, and a lot of my training theories work nicely.