BSAC don’t run boats, the last one was sold nearly 30 years ago.
A group of divers, from any agency, can get carried away when on holiday. Do you know they were from a single branch or even current members. As you’ve offered, what did they do that was so wrong?
It was a club that hired a boat for, I think a week. I talked my way on (thinking that it was just another boat) and spent several days in the lion's den..... I was not on board for the whole week.
On the first day there was a briefing. The club leader started by praising himself and explaining what they were going to do over the next three days. He addressed me specifically, but not directly, saying, "this man is a PADI diver. He is dangerous and you should avoid him".
In addition to being a PADI MSDT and having (at that point in time) about 25-odd years of diving experience, I was also an IANTD certified technical diver and had about 1800 dives. He never asked about any of that. He just assumed, and told his entire club that "this is a PADI diver, therefore he cannot dive".
That set the tone for the next day or so.
His own divers were organized in a very hierarchical structure. A diver with qualification X must be buddied with a dive with qualification Y and so forth.
Once overboard it was immediately clear to me that neither X nor Y could dive. Both divers were vertical in the water column, both had severe buoyancy issues, both were unable during any point in the dive to lay down flat and start diving, neither were communicating, and neither were following the plan that I had heard them brief before they went in the water.
This was not limited to one buddy pair... When I looked around during dive 1 (especially given the focus the dive leader had laid on me not being able to dive) I literally wondered if they were doing this as some kind of joke.....
But no... it was just how they dived.
Even the leader of the group who I assume was an instructor, was hardly able to dive to the standard I would expect from a competent buddy.
I hung around during dives 1 and 2 in the proximity of the weakest group. My vacation dives were quickly becoming supervision duty. I was genuinely concerned that an accident would happen and decided to stay close to the weakest divers in order to intervene if necessary.
After dives 3 and 4 things started to settle in a bit and they started diving to about the same level as my OW students. Again, this wasn't limited to the weakest divers. Some of the divers were, in fact, quite a bit better, but the chaos under water was across the board.
I think it was after dive 3 that one of the divers from the BSAC group approached me and we started talking. He wasn't convinced that I couldn't dive and asked to buddy up with me. I asked his group leader who initially rejected the idea because I didn't have qualification Y (he never did ask me what my qualifications were). After their club diver insisted he reluctantly agreed to allow it for one dive.
I took the guy with me and we made a great dive, after which he spent an hour apologizing for not being a better diver, for holding me back for using too much air, etc. etc. I explained to him that it didn't matter to me and that I was happy he was having fun.
We dived together again for the next day or two IIRC, making a series of really good dives. I was able to get him to slow down, lay down, control his breathing, free up some attention, relax and have fun. We had a great time diving together. I think he learned something from it, not the least of which is that diving should be fun, and all the while having to endure the dive leader putting him under pressure, despite his own observations, to dive with a "proper" diver....
At the end I was happy with the trip, to be honest, because I met one guy who could transcend the group dynamic and was willing to have some fun and make some scuba dives that weren't some kind of test of his fitness to make the dive leader proud..... I made some really good dives with him once I was able to get him to relax and we were able to avoid escalating tensions because of his role as buffer.
That's what being on a BSAC boat is like for a PADI diver.
R..
