Tom,
I agree 200 percent as to practicing safety skills.
There are not many divers who want to take an afternoon away from a fun dive, and do a safety skill. If you know of any, send them my way. I would love to practice skills from basic to advanced to rescue and more. I have a list of 25 saftety dives, and hope not to frustrate another person with my long list.
Anyway, how about this idea? > Divers could eventually be required to fill out a questionaire, asking them (in multiple choice) "how many times did you practice (without a course) your safety skills last year?" If you did any, did you describe them to your log book? Did you get an enthusiastic buddy to participate? With answers (1) none, nobody interested in safety. (2) pretended to do a few on my own, but without a serious dive plan to include safety skills, (3) justed into reading some books on safety and talking about it so maybe I am safety minded? (4) there was one dive, a real dive emergency and it was easy to get back into normal conditions, so what is the big deal? (5) oh my, I did read about the diver who never made it out of dcs, that was too bad. well, it happens!!!
Now, that would be a nice questionaire, hu!!!