Cayman Islands-Any Suggestions???

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I take it this means you think I didn't have the "right attitude" - whatever that means - and that this was the problem, but I don't think I should have had to "work things out with the shop ahead of time" to account for the fact that I might see something really interesting on my dive which would make me come up 5 minutes after the "profile". If you're ok with this kind of diving and having a boat check your computer after and yell at you when you don't follow their rules (assuming there's no safety issue), then I'm sure this would be perfectly fine. For me, I just found it quite irritating to be literally yelled at and it took away from the experience a bit.

It's great no one on a boat has ever had to wait for you to come up after they are done diving, I guess I just sit on the other side of this in that I would never mind waiting on the boat 5-10 minutes for someone because they saw something awesome and wanted to have a better look (or for any other reason for that matter). I would be pretty surprised to hear that anyone else in our group had a problem with this either. I guess I'm just a bit more laid back with my dive vacations and prefer a dive op that is more concerned with my dive experience than with keeping to some set in stone schedule.

Personal preference.

for me the words to live by are

Plan your dive and dive your plan..

The only time a plan should be blown is for safety reasons, not because you came across something interesting.. Too many people have this attitude and its a reflection on training.. The ability to follow a plan shows responsibility and gives insight to the diver.. Those that routinely break a plan typically are the divers that need to be kept an eye on..

I plan all my dive whether they be simple weenie recreational dives or really big expedition level dives that have run times that encompass most of the day.. The planning for recreation stuff is obviously much simpler, usually just maximum depth, avergae depth and run time, where as a tech dive requires thorough planning.

Remember Cayman sees ALOT of inexperienced divers or your holiday diver with 1 or 2 trips a year, and the operations try and keep everyone safe.. The fastest way to get on the operater's wrong side is to just arbitrarily break the rules.. Most operater's use common senese and those that show responsibility are usually given alot more lattitude.. The worse time to just blow the rules is on your first dives with an operation, you set the tone for the rest of the trip..

I have never been yelled at, nor have I been treated as a child.. If you show responsibility most operations will treat you as an adult.. Its all about perception.. I travel alot and use operations all over the world.. I routinely am permitted to do things outside of the normal bounderies, its all about how you present yourself..
I've dove in places where your 5 minutes extra would have started "emergency" procedures.. Max runtimes are in place to give the dms an idea when something is out of the norm.. Unless you have been left in charge of other diver;s safety you probably don't realize why rules are put in place..
 
Well, it sounds like you and that particular DM would have got along great then! I guess our entire group was just overly sensetive, badly trained, and had a bad attitude and it was just a big coincidence that we all had never had such a bad experience with a DM before.

I see your point on the potential problem with coming up a few minutes late, but I still think yelling at anyone in front of other people is always out of line and unprofessional, and it just made him look like a jerk. It's never happened to me before, and I've never seen it happen to anyone else either. I'm not going to argue about it more though because I know the type of diver I am and what the situation was, and despite the fact that you obviously think you know the type of diver I am as you have made several rude and condesending comments about it, you really don't.
 
We had something similar happen to us a long time ago on Little Cayman and it was completely out of line. The attitudes stopped us from returning there for many years. Presumably the resort agreed, since no one with an attitude like that is working there any longer and the situation changed.
 
Well, it sounds like you and that particular DM would have got along great then! I guess our entire group was just overly sensetive, badly trained, and had a bad attitude and it was just a big coincidence that we all had never had such a bad experience with a DM before.

I see your point on the potential problem with coming up a few minutes late, but I still think yelling at anyone in front of other people is always out of line and unprofessional, and it just made him look like a jerk. It's never happened to me before, and I've never seen it happen to anyone else either. I'm not going to argue about it more though because I know the type of diver I am and what the situation was, and despite the fact that you obviously think you know the type of diver I am as you have made several rude and condesending comments about it, you really don't.

I commented about perception and commonalities, not stated what type if diver you are.. Many divers don't even realize how some of their actions are perceived.. Yelling in public is not professional, it should have been done if private if it was directed at a particular buddy team.. if the rules were discussed and violated then it needs to be addressed.. It probably would have been better to discuss it in public without pointing at any specific diver/tem and of course not yelling then reinfore it in private..

I think the actions (intent) of the Dm were justified just not handled in a professinal manner..
 
I took a trip to Sunset House with my LDS last May and had a few issues with the dive operation. Our group had one whole boat to ourselves, and generally the op runs fine, but one of our divemasters was a real jerk. On our first dive one of the days, our dive was supposed to be 50 minutes or something but I saw a tiny baby turtle in the shallows at the end so was playing with it for a little while. When I came up to the ladder, the first thing the divemaster yelled before I even had my fins off
"YOU'RE 9 MINUTES OVER PROFILE".
Oh... ok.... sorry...
My dive buddy came to the ladder a few minutes after that because he was still watching the turtle from the surface and he got yelled at even worse.
"THE WHOLE BOAT IS WAITING FOR YOU".
Ok, the whole boat was our group and nobody cared, plus we had to do our surface interval anyway.
"You two are going in LAST next time because you blew your profiles". As if we were children being punished.
So the next time we were the last to come up again since we were the last ones in and we "blew" our profiles again by like 5 minutes and the WHOLE BOAT HAD TO WAIT. I thought it was totally ridiculous and have never had someone watching my time like that before. We both use computers, so there was no chance we were going into deco or anything like that either so I didn't get what the issue was. To come up after a good dive to have someone screaming at you over 5 minutes is not the way I want to spend a vacation.
He also did other things that were pretty irritating me like telling me it was stupid to have a backup SPG in case my air transmitter stops functioning (which it has done a few times, or sometimes I forget to turn the receiver on or whatever) because it was another point of failure, and also told another girl who said she liked to wait a full 24 hours before flying just to be safe that "if she was so afraid of risk she should take up another sport". Meanwhile the girl had gotten bent the year before on another dive trip so was understandably cautious and was quite offended at his comments.
Anyway , if it was just him I would blame the divemaster alone and not the dive op, but my computer flooded on the 1st day (LDS hadn't sealed the back properly when changing the battery) and our Other divemaster (not the jerk) said to take it to the dive shop and I could rent another for free. I thought that was really nice, but when I went to the dive shop and mentioned it, they got really annoyed and said they didn't know anything about that. Now, I don't expect anything for free, and I thought it was really nice of them if they had let me use one of theirs, but it was really awkward since the other divemaster had told me no problem and then the diveshop was looking at me like I was trying to rip them off - it made me feel really stupid and kind of soured me to them.

Got back from sunset house today, staff is great! really made the trip for us, talk about pampered sunset house is the way to go.
 
Got back from sunset house today, staff is great! really made the trip for us, talk about pampered sunset house is the way to go.

Except that they take the ladders up & close the site for shore diving at the slightest breath of wind. Look at last Weds. for example.
 
My last dive was wednsday morning, so it all worked out, they didn't take them up until wednsday day afternoon. However, it was with good cause as there were 3.5 foot swells coming over the wall. If you stood on the wall long enough you would be taken into the abyss....


Were you diving with sunset divers at all this past week?
 
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