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Hello Everyone,
Can ya help? Like my previous post I'm aiming to get some advice as I'm going to risk it all and try to join the scuba dive professional scene.
Thanks in advance for any joy on the situation.
Am excited to get out there and do it!
Lee
Lee,
There are a few major problems with your plan. First, and hopefully you "care" about this, for an instructor to be valuable to a new diver, they need to be a great resource for "common sense" about diving---and this is something a small percentage of divers gain, after years of diving, and hundreds or thousands of dives...IF IT WAS ALL ABOUT READING THE BOOK AND PASSING A FEW SKILLS, WHY WOULD YOU EVEN NEED A DIVE INSTRUCTOR? Face it, the material you learn in the instructional material should not challenge a chimpanzie to learn... the "basic" skills are so easy for some people, it is almost like they had them before diving the first time, and even for the new divers who don't get the skills easily, this is something that is picked up in a week or so, and then you have it, and you get certified.
Things like how you plan a dive, judgement, how to handle nuances in lots of different current situations, a thousand issues that are NOT in your dive text book, this is what you want an instructor for....and this is something IMPOSSIBLE for a "90 day wonder" in your plan. It would be years before you offered a real value of knowledge to any new divers, meaning you would be doing a severe dis-service to anyone who paid you for quite a long time...and that is assuming you are one of the divers who actually does learn a wealth of common sense behaviors from years of diving ) there are many people with none of this at all after decades.
Second, using your last dollar to become a dive instructor, as we are entering a 6 to 10 year global depression is not showing any common sense. The middle classes and even the wealthy will be cutting back for years now, in their leisure spending, and scuba instruction will not be an exception here.
My advice is to think of something you would enjoy doing in a depressed economy for the next 10 years, and try to find this job in a location with great diving....Dive your brains out for 3 years, gain a good sized peer group of dive buddies you dive with often......and then after several years, see if the people you dive with actually believe you have the "common sense gene" for diving--and if they think you would make a good instructor.