For the record, the guy in my story was not PADI...and I'll just leave it at that.

I'm not sure that reducing the instructor role a good thing, though. All I have to draw on here is my own experience, and I have to say that my instructors have been awesome. We got our OW training in Aruba, AOW and Nitrox in Key Largo, and a number of specialties since then from my LDS.

For OW, we were in Aruba in the off season, and LadyDog and I happened to be the only students for four instructors at the dive shop that week. They sent us the OW manual two weeks before we went down. They did some discover dives and they had a fair number of certified divers on the boats, but we were the only OW students. We were drilled and grilled at every turn. Our pool days were full day sessions. Our nights were spent with our faces in the books. For our final checkout dive our instructor turned off the gas valve without us knowing, then threw our rigs as far off the boat as he could into a pretty choppy sea. As they floated away on the current he looked at us and said, "go get 'em, put 'em on, swim back to the boat and I'll hand down your weight belts. Then we'll go diving." It was an interesting lesson in problem solving.

For AOW again, we were the only two students assigned to our instructor. We had a young, but conscientious instructor who was very thorough. We did 10 dives on that trip, and although we passed the requirements for AOW and Nitrox somewhere around dive 6, he dove with us for all 10 tanks and continued to critique and work with us the whole time.

I'm sure we wouldn't have gotten that type of personal treatment if it had been busy, but I'm happy we did. Our instructors really cared, and I hope it shows in our diving.

Maybe this story suggests that one thing to look for in deciding on an instructor, is class size. If an instructor is dealing with ten students, each one is only going to get a tenth of his attention.

Mountain Dog