How Stressed Out are Instructors During OW Class?

[MrChen]

I was at Blue Heron Bridge this weekend. Viz was crap about 10-15, closer to 10. I'm at the east bridge when this whirlwind of divers comes through. Holy smokes, what a mess. Anyways, everyone flailing arms and swimming vertically, and the guy they were following swam more confidently, but he didn't look comfortable at all. He was almost swimming like the students except you could tell he was leading.

For fun, I captured some video and took some pictures in the now 5 ft of viz. I'll get those off the camera after tonights night dive. But the instructor would swim 15 ft, stop, turn around, look around like a worried parent who couldn't find his kids at the fair, wait for everyone to catch up, then go another 15 ft, and repeat.

I thought to myself, this guy must be stressed all to hell. Limited visibility with currents from the tide coming in and teaching students with zero form. He was forgetting how to dive himself, completely consumed by herding his class around. I didn't see them practicing any skills besides standing on the sea floor .

So tell me, how stressed was this instructor?

 

[lv2dive]

Maybe (hopefully!) it wasn't a class - maybe it was a guided guide. Because for those fifteen or so feet, it doesn't sound like the "leader" had a possibility of having a clue of what was going on with the rest of group - and that would not be a good situation for a class.

 

[Quero]

How do you know this was an instructor? Maybe it was just the guy with the flag....

The water there is so very shallow that poor trim really stirs up the bottom sediment, and because everybody has to dive all at once there due to the window allowed by the tides, I think a lot of really inexperienced divers are in the water on any given day, many of them in groups with one designated to tow the flag.

 

[Scared Silly]

When I played a teaching DM I was rarely nervous because before taking students on a dive I typically knew who needed to be watched.

Now I will admit one of the funnier dives while teaching was a night dive. A gal was really nervous. So the instructor put her by him. While he had the rest of the group 5-6 divers would be in a V-shape like geese with the two DM at the ends. My DM partner thought oh this is going to be fun. We descended and things got mucked up with the bad viz. Eventually, I had two lights next to me so I signaled them and we went off. Well one of the divers was the nervous gal, the other was the other DM. She was the safest diver in the lake. And the rest of the group did fine they all ascended regrouped and did the did as a group.

 

[Kharon]

For my OW cert dives my instructor went on vacation and had a stand-in that had never worked with the class. This ahole decided that everyone would do things "his way" which was differently than what we were taught in class. Being dumb I didn't challenge that. During the OOA task to give him my primary reg and switch to my octo "his way" I didn't find my octo immediately. No problem for me as I have been to 50' from the surface without any air that wasn't in my lungs while snorkeling. This arrogant ahole freaked and aborted within seconds. Mr "I can drop like a stone and stop one foot from the bottom with an exact puff of air" had a panic attack and pissed me off big time. (In my mind " Could you at least give me a few seconds to remember "your method" which isn't second nature?"). As John Belushi would say "But NOOOOOOOOOOOO". Worse, he jumped on me and told me I shouldn't be certified. What? You change the procedure last minute, panic, and it's my fault? Don't think so! I did get the cert after a repeat but realized that (some) instructors just have cards and aren't necessarily great instructors or divers.

 

[MrChen]

Kate/Quero,

Someone else suggested this to me in person, that it was possibly a discovery dive or something. I never did witness them practicing any skills and they had absolutely none. Vis was crap and the guy was probably trying to keep the herd together. It didn't look like he was enjoying himself.

 

[toddthecat]

If he was an instructor I wouldn't call it stressed. I'd call it inexperienced. If this was a DM leading a DSD I'd call it f****** stupid, especially with regard to the shop that let him take people around.

 

[Quero]

That dive site has several features making it attractive for inexperienced divers--it's easy access, it's free, and it's shallow. However there are also peculiarities that make it more challenging than it would appear at first glance: the very shallowness of the site requires really good buoyancy, which takes a while to develop, and so inexperienced divers are usually still in a learning curve in that respect, with the result that they disturb the bottom. As well, the tides determine when divers can use the site, so everybody going there--students, newbies, experienced divers--is in the water all at the same time during slack tide rather than spread throughout the day, and because of that it gets crowded with hoards of divers leaving clouds of silt behind them.

 

[TSandM]

When we teach in Puget Sound, our visibility is often in the ten foot range (sometimes worse). I do find it very stressful to escort students in those conditions, but I try desperately hard NEVER to lead from in front. It's difficult, because students naturally want to be ducklings, and follow the instructor -- but we give them a fair amount of information about limited peripheral vision, and about team positioning, and get them to practice it in the pool, so that we can ask them to do it in open water, too.

I find OW dive 1 (the one where it is just a tour) to be the most stressful thing I do in diving. There have been Dive 1s where I got out and looked at Peter and said, "I'm not doing that ever again!"

 

[Gunrock]

This is kind of a timely post for me. I've been trying to finish up my own DM I started a long time ago. Did not finish on schedule due to an injury and some other factors but this weekend I finally got in the water with an instructor and his OW class for their Dives 1 and 2. It went pretty smoothly but the viz here in Hawaii is excellent and keeping track of everyone is quite easy. There was one student who was not feeling well and got taken back into shore, but everyone else did fine. I don't think either of the two instructors I was with felt any stress at all.

But this whole DM experience and especially this weekend had me thinking really hard back to my own OW cert back in 2002 in CA. Why? Because I can still distinctly recall doing certain skills in the pool, but I can't recall doing ANY skills in the ocean. I do remember a few details, like a different instructor being at the beach whom I hadn't seen before, and me being saddled up with 40 lbs of weight (!!!). I remember being told to follow the student diver in front of me, and although we were supposed to skirt the edge of a canyon all I saw was a big cloud of sand and the fins of the diver in front of me. For the life of me I can't recall doing any skills whatsoever during OW dives 1-4. Maybe my memory is just failing me but I find it odd that I remember the weekend and the diving to some extent, I remember the pool skills and having some problems with them, but I just can't recall doing any skills in the ocean at all.

BTW according to my PADI instructor manual you don't need to do any u/w skills for OW 1 other than descend in a controlled manner and "explore the dive site."