And you will find bad dive shops all over the world as well. It seems to me that you have experienced two of them, found that a “common” factor was that they were run by “Europeans”, and decided that this was the reason. It’s a very tired meme on this board, but it really applies in this instance: correlation does not equal causation. Most likely your experience is just coincidence. Since all anyone can offer here is personal anecdotes, there isn’t really a way to conclusively prove or disprove your theory anyway.
But once you’re a certified diver, you don’t dive with an instructor anymore. Part of being certified means you no longer require the services of a divemaster or instructor. Unless you mean showing your logbook from when you were certified, but that’s pointless as well, since you’ve got a certification card, and your cert. dives may have been decades in the past.
Heck, once you buy your own equipment, the only time you need to go to a dive shop is to fill your tanks, and they don’t even ask for a cert card for that.
You admitted above that you’re not a diver, didn’t you? Are you basing all this on the wiki page you linked?
The fitness required to go through a dive is different than that needed to carry 60-100 lb. of equipment a few hundred yards. Just because you’ve got a bad shoulder and can no longer carry a dive bag doesn’t mean you need to give up diving.
Well, over here, you need to show that you regularly keep diving in order to be on your toes. What good is a certificate if you haven’t dived for 20 years, and so have both forgotten half of the practical aspects, and don’t know the new equipment?
That doesn’t mean that a diving instructor is going down with you; but he will sign the card for you. You don’t dive alone (rule number 1); over here, people either are members of a diving club, so when they practise, the coach signs, or they are members of the Red Cross Water Rescue dept. (Wasserwacht), and train with and for them.
I said I’m not a diver myself, yes. That doesn’t mean I’m completly ignorant. About the fitness, I checked back with a friend who was a certified diver with the Wasserwacht, all the way to diving under the ice. (He didn’t get to afford vacations in the Caribbean, he was a student, so he just dived for dead bodies in the local lakes.)
Maybe we are talking about different definitions of fitness then. To me, fitness means first the vasco-cardular system, heart, lungs. Which is why I said in my response that the heart, lungs, and circulatory system is stressed when diving, and needs to be in shape. I specifically did not talk about carrying stuff. If you include shoulders (or arm strength, or whatever) in being fit, you should say so.
You also didn’t clarify what age bracket you’re moving towards when you said you were getting older - 30 turning 40 is different than 70 turning 80.
All I can say then is that this sounds very specific to Germany, and possibly Europe. I’ve never been to a dive operation in the US or any vacation spot that wanted a logbook signed by anyone else. And while of course you don’t dive alone, you can dive with a buddy whenever you want to, not needing any sort of club permission.
Question - does your friend scuba dive in Germany for fun, or is he only certified for work purposes? I ask because you used the word “practice” - I live in Massachusetts, and I used to dive all summer long for fun (and lobster) with a few friends. No need to get a club or coach or anyone else involved.
If you’re diving from shore, you pretty much have to carry gear to & from your car, often several hundred yards. If you’re diving from a charter boat, they will often carry the gear for you, help you on with weight belt & gear, etc. Lots of people who don’t shore dive anymore because carrying all the gear is daunting will continue to safely boat dive. That’s the “not in shape” that I believe yarster was referring to when he was talking about boat diving - no longer able to easily carry lots of gear back & forth.
Dead Cat - my goal in starting this thread was to indeed establish whether this is a pattern or whether I was just grasping at straws based on a sample size of two, which could indeed be the case. I understand that either is possible, anecdotes are not evidence, and correlation is not causation. That said, if the overwhelming response came back as “Yes, all European dive shops do this!” then I would factor that in when picking a dive company and country to dive in for the future. That is, if the answer really was that I was right, and I found myself on a cruise where I could only afford to do one dive with my choices being St. Thomas (US) or Martinique (French), I would be more likely to pick St. Thomas.
Bambi Hassenpfeffer - I did say “generally”. On the cruise we just did with Princess, they did not offer any diving excursions in Grenada, which is a tragedy in my opinion because the underwater sculpture garden they have there is pretty cool and not to be missed. We booked off the ship, and that was the single best dive of the entire trip.
Constanze - clearly Germany has stricter requirements than the U.S. and most of the rest of the world does for diving. I have only ever been asked for my C-card and nothing more. A dive log is basically just a diary. I’m not sure how a random dive shop in the Caribbean is supposed to know that the signature in my log from a dive shop in Australia is real and was signed two years ago as opposed to one I forged five minutes beforehand in the parking lot. The reason I say the health thing isn’t an issue for a boat dive is because you are neutrally buoyant in the water when diving. If the equipment is already on the boat, and already set up for you, then in most cases, you only have to carry it less then five feet to get to the edge of the boat, and then up a small step ladder. Even then, I have used companies that would place the equipment on the edge of the boat for you, and have you take it off in the water so you didn’t have to carry it up the step ladder. Yes, you have to have decent circulatory health and you do always sign a waver. By ‘health’, I meant “ability to carry a sixty pound weight under extremely hot temperature conditions over several hundred yards” versus “ability to withstand a slightly elevated heart rate for a few minutes”.
I promise you all I am not trying to turn this into a thread about whether Europeans are good or bad. I am simply trying to understand if this is a real pattern and if this is the way Europeans act in general so that I can make an informed decision when selecting a dive shop in the future. I am 41 now, am in average shape, and have been a certified diver for 20+ years. I just want to know because when I am 60, I can probably still dive with a U.S./other outfit, but probably not with a European one if they require my definition of “health” and “self service” for dealing with the equipment.
Sorry, my response reads more harshly than I intended - no offence meant, just summing up my view of the situation. Based on my own experience (of a properly-run dive shop in Thailand owned by Belgians) and the rest of the responses in the thread, it seems to me that no conclusions can be drawn, and you might easily run into a bad shop on St Thomas, or a good one on Martinique.
The best person on this board to answer this would probably be Scuba_Ben, but sadly he hasn’t shown up yet. Maybe you could PM him? I am far from an expert in this field but I suspect that he is.
Well, as the wikipedia article notes, dive shops can pick and choose what certification they accept, and so not only common sense for your customer, but also liabilty plays a role - the more papers the customer shows, the better the dive shop can shift responsibility to the diver.
Again, most shops apparently err on the side of caution even when filling bottles only, though I bet a regular customer has an easier time than a never-seen-before one.
It’s certainly possible to go to a lake and dive with just a buddy - it’s not against the law; but there geography comes into play. In Bavaria, the big lakes like Starnberg are cloudy from sediment, so diving is not fun; the alpine lakes are crystal clear, but not only hard to reach, but also “dead” - without any nutrient, there’s neither fauna nor flora. The north and east sea are pretty cold and also pretty dead (bottom-net fishing, too many boats and waste pollution).
So the dive clubs practise with the equipment once a week in the swimming pools during winter, and in the summer, take a one-week trip to the Red Sea for the real diving (the closest tropic sea from Europe). The Mediterrenean is pretty much dead ecologically and not so attractive.
My friend doesn’t work as diver; he got certified by and for the Wasserwacht, one branch of the Red Cross that does the water rescue in Southern Germany. (In North Germany, it’s the DLRG who does Baywatching of the North and East Sea beaches and river rescue).
The deal is: you get all the training for free (takes 1 to 2 years, first the A-, then the B-certificate), and in return, you are on-call to do rescue-diving if the need arises. E.g. one summer day, he was lying on the grass by Lake Langwied, when one woman told the Wasserwacht guard on duty that her boy-friend was missing, last seen in the water over there. So the guard told my friend to look, he put on the Scuba gear and dived to look for the dead body*. (it turned out ok: the idiot boyfriend had sneaked off, gotten drunk and fallen asleep under a bush, missing all the frantic calls and running around).
- In most cases, once somebody has been underwater long enough that you call for the diver, you only expect a dead body to be found, but probably “Dead body diver” sounds too depressing compared to “rescue diver”.
The other way for recreational divers is to join a club or go to a school and pay several hundred Euros to get certified for fun diving.
If he had new gear and was in shape, his Wasserwacht certificate would be accepted from normal dive shops - one owner of a dive shop/ school wanting to hire him as instructor told him that the Wasserwacht cert. was considered the highest classification, because the Red Cross is quasi-offical, and stricter than a simply paid-to-train school.
The Wasserwacht also requires their rescue divers to get checked by a doctor annually and to log a minimum of 10 dives with 300 min. per year to renew the cert. each year, because rescue divers need to be in top shape (and they only choose the fittest people from the Wasserwacht volunteers to train as rescue divers to start with). It’s expected that if you’re no longer in shape or unavailable for rescue work, that you notify the local group and turn your cert. back in.
Obviously, for hobby divers, the requirements are far less strict.
That’s really not my experience of Germany. In restaurants, for example, I’ve found people generally treated me in a friendly manner that made me feel welcome. Maybe it depends where you go, or maybe I’ve just been lucky.
While I was only in Germany for a day (yes another cruise), we did go all around Hamburg while our ship went through the Keil Canal and the people everywhere we went gave us good service. That said, I would have expected the tour company to take us to an area that was known for good service all things considered.
constanze - thank you for the education into what Germany does. I can see that what the rest of the world treats as a generic hobby, the Germans take very, very seriously. To be honest, if I lived in Germany I prbably wouldn’t have even bothered to get certified. The truth is, I live in San Diego, CA and both my wife and I were certified here. Despite the perfect weather, we find the water too cold, the fish too ugly, and the visibility too low to make it worthwhile to ever go around here. I guess we are pretty spoiled…
By comparison, back when I got certified in 1991, I got it through the YMCA which I don’t think even does certification classes any more. The class was just under two weeks long in the evenings, you did all pool dives except your one shore checkout dive, and then you got your Open Water C-card, which is good to 100 feet and is granted to you for life.
I’m a PADI divemaster and have spent some years working in a London dive shop, running club trips to the coast and one trip to the Red Sea. We made almost no money out of trips and kit rental, most of it came from training. We ran trips almost on a private basis simply because that’s what kept experienced divers with us, and that club atmosphere and experience attracted new divers.
Our attitude was always that were were happy if you wanted to dive with us. Show me your certification and (if it’s going to be an open water trip) your dive log so that I know what kind of experience you have. You’ll sign the health checker and the boilerplate PADI disclaimer, then we’ll discuss what equipment you need. I’ll give you some advice based on my experience of where we’re going and I’ll get your kit out and test if for you. As we were based in central London I’d tell you when the boat was leaving aand from which port, it would be up to you to meet us there and get on board. I did often have spares with me, simply because I know what sort of things often break (fin straps anybody?) and I had a lot of kit, but beyond that you’ve got your kit and you’re responsible for it.
I have seen weights being put into BCD pockets, but usually they’re only for trim and as the weights are a relatively small part of your overall lead they won’t inhibit an emergency ascent. Because we have pretty strict Health & Safety rules we everyone signed a health checker and a disclaimer, we had very tight procedures around making sure everyone got back onto the boat and that sort of thing. But beyond that, what we were providing was the hire of working equipment and the opportunity to dive off a hired boat. I was always happy to give dive briefings to anyone who hadn’t dived the site before but I wouldn’t see it a part of my role to carry your stuff for you or to make sure you’d brought everything onto the boat. You’re an adult, you’re an experienced diver and you’ve been trained by a professional; your safety is your responsibility.
Having said that, we were all well aware that the boats we got in the Red Sea were very much European stylee and were very enevious of the American boats, as their level of service was much much higher than anything we ever got. The thought of someone humping all your kit on board was a dream. Mind you, their prices were considerably higher too.
I wanted to adress this specific part: yes, of course logs or even cert.s could be faked. But part of the long training and theory is to get people to understand the dangers of the activity and act like responsible adults on their own. So while on the one hand, there’s a lot of training to go through and hoops to pass, on the other hand you are expected to show responsibility yourself once you’ve passed them.
Certainly there is always a percentage of people who think that nothing will happen to them, only to others, and disregard rules meant for their protection. They even get away with it for some time, until something goes wrong in a big way.
BTW, this applies not only to diving but general to dangerous acitivites: car driving, swimming, mountain climbing - whether it’s officially ordered and licensed training, or training done by the expert group, it’s always stressed “This is dangerous if done wrong, use your common sense, be responsible”.
That this doesn’t always work is seen in the number of car drivers caught drunk (or crashing drunk), or that a fine for not using seatbelts was necessary. Stil, the law takes the attitude that adults should act responsible once they are educated. In return, the rules are only those necessary for safety, not idiotic ones. Having a real dive log showing your experience is good for your own safety, so that the tour guide like Moonshine can give you the necessary pointers and maybe recommend you dive with an instructor and not alone in this place because …
So forging one because you lack the experience or haven’t practised in the last 20 years only to get onto a boat can backfire if you get in over your head. And because other people may depend on you out there, you endanger them potentially also, so they will be pissed when they find out.
(Mountain hiking, as Bavarian sport, is similar, though less dangerous than diving. If somebody, during the discussion before a week-long tour, lies about his experience or fitness, it will become apparent during the first day, leading to a pissed-off tour guide and group. Depending on the area, ditching might not be possible, but after return, everybody at the Alpine club would hear about it, he might even be kicked out. So it wouldn’t be worth it in the long run.
I can only speak for my own experience on this, but the dive shops I have gone with, which include those in Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia, Mexico, Bermuda, and throughout the Caribbean have only ever asked for a C-card and for you to sign the standard disclaimer.
I still contend the dive log is just a diary. You can fill it with truth or fiction, and it serves no purpose in my opinion other than perhaps reminding you of some change in your dive gear (i.e. you got fatter over the past five years so you need more weight in your belt now). Over several years if I have always used 16 lbs, I shouldn’t feel the need to keep it in a log. I also don’t intend to ever get a more advanced certification or to become a divemaster where such records may be a requirement, so I don’t bother. No one else I know who dives keeps a log either. If I went to a dive shop that demanded the log, I would invite them to ask me questions about my previous dives as an alternative, but if it was a deal breaker I would either go to another shop, or I would conclude based on the their insistence of knowing that it was probably an advanced dive I wasn’t qualified for (i.e. cave dive, night dive, very poor visibility, extreme cold weather dive, greater than 100 foot depth dive, etc.). All I do is the touristy “see the pretty fish and the shipwreck” dives. There’s no reason to treat such a dive as a
major undertaking.
I have been asked a few times “when was your last dive?” by a handful of shops, but all the dives were otherwise of the ‘follow the divemaster, and stay within a few arm’s length of your buddy’. The divemasters rightly assumed no one had been to the dive site in question so they always go over it in great detail. Even if I HAD been to a site before, I am not so arrogant as to assume nothing had ever changed and/or that the currents would be the same on that day versus a previous day. I have only been on one dive (Bermuda) where they told us to go off on our own with our buddies and that was because it was in 20 feet of water.
Perhaps the litigious nature of the U.S. is why I would expect dive shops to be more involved with their customers other than just handing them gear and saying “you’re on your own”. Even if this is the way in Europe and it really is my own fault I dove when I should not have, does any business really want the stigma of having killed their customer because they couldn’t bother to spend 10 seconds checking over a diver’s rig to make sure they didn’t forget something or screw something up? That, and the part where they tell you to “test your gear” because they don’t know if anything’s broken are the two parts that really pissed me off most.
To be fair a log book is just a diary and can be easily faked. But why would you want to fake it?
I’d look at the log to get an idea of the diver’s experience to advise them, which is a benefit to them. There’s no minimum number of dives you need for most shallow, warm-water diving. If you were signing on for something harder (and we did have plenty of that in the UK) then I’d want to gauge your experience and how fresh it was. I did most of my diving in cold water with relatively low viz and the likelyhood of currents. If you turned up with your own dry suit I was already pretty confident that you were experienced. If you were still a little shaky I’d buddy you up with someone I wouldn’t miss too much 
My point really was around customer service; it’s a divemaster’s job to make sure everyone one the boat is safe and all that entails but I’d never feel responsible for humping their gear for them or carrying a ton of spares if they’re dumb selves forgot something. The only exception is lead, as so many things can influence how bouyant you are and it can be hard to judge that from a warm cosy dive shop.
I know that this expectation is very different in the US, something we were happy about as divemasters, but envious of when we went on recreational trips of our own. I did a few dives on the Barrier Reef off Green Island and it was such a treat to have a boat take you out fifty yards (at home I’d have expected to surface swim that) and people helping on and off with your tanks. It was heaven, heaven I tell you!
Well, then I guess that validates my theory that even a European will prefer the ‘heavenly’ service you get from a non-European dive outfit
As to why you might fake a dive log, you’re right in that it is a bad practice. That said, the other problem the U.S. has in droves is service people who are sometimes so dumb that they cannot use common sense in making a decision. If a dive shop hires some minimum wage person to book the dive boats, and says “and make sure they are experienced before you book them”, that person is going to look for a hard and fast rule to use to gauge “experience”. Let’s say this one particular guy decides it is a dive within the past 3 months and wants evidence of it in the form of a paper document he can’t verify. Now let’s say that due to logistical reasons, this moron is the gatekeeper to the one dive shop in the area that fits my needs because of when the dive boat is going, the site they are going to, etc. I could see a scenario where you might fake something just to get around this moron. Yes, it’s a fairly implausible scenario, I admit, but it could happen.
It happens outside the U.S. too. For example, look at the dive shop in Bonaire where we went run by the Dutch folks. The woman at the register was an incredibly attractive gal in a tight fitting top that was clearly there as eye candy. This was a woman who I watched hand snorkelers the wrong size fins, and who then had to come back to get a replacement. She would also often defer questions to the other men who clearly were the divers that were smoking outside. If she had been there alone, I could see her making some kind of dumb snap judgment like this regarding experience. Of course, then I’d have to have a conveniently blank dive log with me…O.k. maybe it is a stretch…