Here is a question and response from a Course Director (not one of our IDC Guide Course Directors)
Enquiry: I recently completed my Dive master course in Australia and I would like to go on to do the IDC I believe that I need 100 dives before you can qualify for OWSI, is that right? If so I am only on 65 dives at the moment. I want to return to Thailand in June/July to do the IDC, but do you have anything in place for me to make up the 35 dives that I’m missing? Also I wanted to inquire about the cost of the course: What is the total cost of the IDC that you offer including materials. I ask because the materials you have on sale are the 2009 version and I thought that a 2010 version had already come out [idc guide says: sloppy Course Directors not updating their website, this is a sign that they may not put enough care into their training]. I would be looking for work after my PADI IDC course as I want to use this qualification as a means to support traveling and know that getting that first job is the hardest so willing to make sacrifices to get my foot on the dive career ladder. [idc guide says: there is no harm in offering to work for free to show that you are a reliable and honest Dive Instructor]
With the five dives that you would be logging on the IDC, that would leave you with 30 dives needed, what I can for you, which isn’t ideal I know but at that time of year there are no liveaboards running, so what I could do is make a package for you for 5 days diving, which would get you back in the water if you haven’t been diving for a while, and it would get you your dive numbers up to the minimum required for entry into the IE.
You would need 100 logged dives for the IE although you could log 5 on the IDC so you would be looking at needing another 30 dives before the start of the IDC.
There are NO minimum standards for a “fun dive” …. So you can do and log, for example, 10 x 1 minute dives and they “count” …. NOT that I am suggesting that you do this for a minute !!! although I have seen some CDs doing this – they send them off to the beach with a couple of tanks and pick them up 3 or 4 hours later and they just logged 20 dives !!!
PADI standards for training dives are minimum depth of 5m and 20 minutes, so I have always said to students that if they are doing a 50 minute dive, then as long as they surface, I see no problem in logging that as 3 dives [idc guide says: shouldn’t that be 2 dives? ], which means on a 3 dive day you should be logging 6 dives plus a day !!!
IDC Guide note: The minimum standards are just that ‘minimum’ and we always recommend having more dives and experience that the minimum required, at the start of your dive career dive numbers seem so important but its not a race and the joy of diving is the journey not the arriving 🙂