Aquatic Sports Rebreather Failure, Not Qualified to Teach, Could Have Drowned Portland Oregon

 I signed up for the new SSI program to learn how to use a rebreather because I wanted to go deeper and stay longer. I have a little bit of technical diving experience, so I thought it would be relatively easy as an introductory student. It turns out that the instructor, who is also the owner, did a two day training to teach students how to use the Poseidon rebreather. After this experience, I did a little research and it turns out that his instruction should have been over 100 hours.  It was flabergasted!

The day I was going to do the required six dives, it turns out that he was teaching a regular scuba class, a dry suit class, a rescue diving class and my rebreather class.  At first I thought that another instructor was going to show up to help, the way he was talking, but no one ever came to assist. I did one dive and at that point he told me I would be on my own. I started out with the rest of the other students and the d**n thing broke. I had to switch to my bailout system and end the dive. I was so mad that I just went home.

I spoke to a friend who used to go to Aquatic Sports and he told me that when that system first came to Aquatic Sports, someone choked on a mouthful of water in the pool. When they went to Clear Lake to try out the system on a demo day, another one of the units failed and the diver barely made it back to the surface. It turns out that there was suppose to be a safety person in a boat on the surface, but she had to take a piss so she left all the divers in the water by themselves! None of them had bailout systems either. Years earlier, one of their instructors had a failure on the store's rebreathers and he has never dove rebreathers again, too. Just because this guy has been in business for a long time, don't let that persuade you to go there to learn how to do anything. I spent almost $1,000 and I got nothing! I'm probably going to go to somewhere else to finish up my education after I cool off and get my diving legs back.