#142
USACMASDiver - 7/22/2014 2:28 PM
Dear Aikidiver -

You wrote, "So for a LDS it’s a no brainer! As an instructor! PADI is by far your best option!" Grammatically, here we are comparing only two fruit - Apples and Oranges. Thus, we could say that PADI is by far the ’better’ option," but as we are talking about only two agencies here, we cannot say, "The best option." Diving Agencies are just like whales - there are all kinds of options here that swim in the sea. For example, in my organization I could train a diver from the hatch of a submarine in the Southern Ocean and my requirement would be that I send the paperwork to the nation of where the submarine is registered. Period. Done deal. PADI is great and so is SSI. I have taken buckets of courses from both, but in my value systems, lowest diving accident rate in the world, in the history of the industry, it big medicine. For the individual instructor, when comparing SSI to PADI, PADI is generally the better choice. A lot of diving instructors would agree with that. That was one reason why Mares purchased SSI in the first place. SSI was basically BackWater International until a Japanese consortium paid them $4M USD for their franchise, and then, then by magic their training material started to look swanky. See if you can find a copy of SSI’s first training manuals. There are a lot of whales in the ocean - lots.