training agency

[nimoh]

Some questions for you PSD divers in Minnesota.

What training agency (or agencies) is your PSD dive team trained under?

Do you have your own instructor on your team?

How often do you conduct classes/refreshers?

Is your team LEO, FD, other?

Is your team volunteeer or professional?

thanks.

[DetectorGuy]

Welcome to the board,
We are not PSD divers anymore... so my feedback is probably not qualified as 'current'.

We all had various training agencies prior to joining, but primarily PADI during our involvement.

One of the members on the team was our instructor, and I have told him before that I think he is the best instructor that I have ever had.

Our training was at least twice per month The most training we logged in a single year was over 300 hours per diver.

We were a volunteer dive team for the Sherriffs Department.

[nimoh]

thanks for the info, and thanks for the welcome.

We are a volunteer dive team for the Olmsted County Sheriff's Department and train twice a month and currently looking at getting formal training. We are down to two options.

1. Bring in an ERDI instructor to teach classes.
2. We have a team member that is a PADI instructor, and getting him qualified to teach PADI PSD.

Personally, I am leaning toward the ERDI option based on what I have found out about both programs. However, there may be times when we end up in a joint effort, so I am hoping to find out more about the teams in surrounding counties. Ultimately, it will be the Sheriff's decision and I am just trying to gather some information.

We had a subset of our team out in Winona a couple of months ago for the search for the missing people, and I know there were a few other teams out there as well. I couldn't help but notice how different we were in some respects to other teams, and wondering if training could help close the gap to make teams work more efficiently together.

[DetectorGuy]

Training with other agencies is huge. Just to see what works for other groups and what doesn't is worth the effort of setting up a joint training. ERDI has a good program but very pricey, especially if your sherriff is as tight as ours was. The cost for ERDI would be considerably less if you could get another county to take the class with you and prorate the cost with them. Doing a training session on a Mutual Aid situation is a good topic to go over protocols and 'what if's' before the actual event. We had a Mutual Aid in another county one morning and one guy who looked like he just woke up was on shore & asking all kinds of questions about the recovery process. I was reluctant to give him any information as I thought he might be a family member, or neighbor. Turns out he was the Sherriff of the county we were assisting wearing his civies. At the time we didn't have uniforms either, but the drysuit was a giveaway as to what we were up to.

[nimoh]

I agree. I know Winona County has done ERDI training, which is a big reason that ERDI has made our short list. Budget is big factor as to why PADI training has made our short list, as the instructor would be a team member and would only be charging for instruction materials.

I did hear from the ERDI instructor that when PADI was starting up their PSD training program they ask him to come on board (he is a PADI OW instructor as well). He declined giving the reason that he didn't agree with the differences in the PADI program such as changes to rope pull signals.