dressing for tech diving? (was in What the Heck is DIR?)

[Freedive WI]

You should have seen the boat captain they used who smoked like a chimmney on the way out to the wreck site and then would jump in and dive while we were diving. He came up to me on the EMBA(170') one day and was out of air, but he had close to 50 minutes of deco to do! I gave him one of my stage bottles, since I had plenty of gas left, and he was able to finish it all. The worst part about it was that after the dive he told me: " I didn't run out of air, because you had gas for me!"
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It used to be very hard to find proper trimix instruction around here. When I first looked into classes my choices where pretty much either Billy Deans, in Florida, or Wings Stock, in California. Neither one of these fit inot my budget at the time.

After checking out a few instructors around here,who hadn't had any student's die during their courses, I finally ran into Greg Such. I had know him for a while, since he always brought groups out on the charter boat I worked on, but now he had his trimix instructor rating. More importantly to me, after all of the issues I had with the stroke instructors, he was totally DIR. It was a good fit and I would reccomend him to anyone. I also got to meet and dive with other GUE certified divers, and former WKPP divers, through him and have been VERY impressed with the level of safety that every last one of those divers showed.

Before my experiences with the other instructor I wasn't really that much into the whole DIR thing. I like how they had their gear set up, but that was it. After watching 3 divers run out of gas in 2 weeks of deep diving with the strokes, I knew there had to be a better way- I have never run out of air in 24 years of diving. Every DIR principle I put into action just seemed to work like a charm.

Oh yeah, those classes had no lecture. I would read the book and take the test. Then, I would write out the mistakes in the books and show what the answers should have been- they gave different answers under the meteric/imperial section which is how I double checked eveything and knew I was right the first time. Then, we'd go out and doing a bunch of silly skills, while I dragged along a camera to shoot pictures of it all.

It was very frustrating to take a course from an instructor whose skill weren't up to par, but they spent the money on the card and I wanted that card so I had to jump through some hoops to get it. All of these c-cards get pretty goofy after a while and was a small reason why I have since jumped into freediving. I know of freedivers who have only taken a single scuba lesson, yet can swim down to 290' and back on a single breath of air. They are fish in the water, but have no cards to show for it. I would put their diving skills up against any scuba instructor trainer i have ever met.

Jon