The State of Diving

[Walter]

I still remember, with great dismay, my first 10-15 or sadly a few more dives after getting my OW C-card. Upside down, head in the sand, mask strap breaking, stirring up silt, feeling like there were 10,000 things going on all at the same moment in time, and frustration! I still remember the exact dive and where I was when the epiphany, as it were, happened. I remember how awesome it felt when the buoyancy and the trim all fell into place. I remember coming up thinking; wow...I actually got to see some stuff and enjoy the dive without having to concentrate only on staying trim and off the bottom.

Now imagine how it would have felt if you'd been competent before that first open water dive. You would have been hooked from the beginning. You would have had lots more fun.

It's not about elitism. Anyone can do it. It's actually easier. I think it may be elitist to deny this experience to new divers. Who are we to say vacation divers don't need better skills? Who are we to say they are undeserving?

Ah, the ever popular highly critical newbie bashing thread.

Absolutely not! I think novices deserve better treatment from those of us who teach them to dive. We. all too frequently, short change them. No one here is bashing novices, we are trying to give them better. They deserve better.

 

[ZenDiver.3D]

Yeah we all saw it and now we're going to think you flap your hands around when you dive too.

God.... if I had to apologize for every typo, grammar and spelling mistake and stupid thing I ever said, I'd need a personal assistant to keep a list! Don't worry about it.

R..

Typo's I make in bulk.... Typey too fast and click too soon, but just flat out, poor language? Nope. I needed more coffee. No self-respecting UGA girl would ever make those errors. Okay, back to the regularly scheduled program...

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I have to agree with Garobbo. Like many if not most of you on here, I'm an instructor with 1,000+ dives. However, I still remember, with great dismay, my first 10-15 or sadly a few more dives after getting my OW C-card. Upside down, head in the sand, mask strap breaking, stirring up silt, feeling like there were 10,000 things going on all at the same moment in time, and frustration! I still remember the exact dive and where I was when the epiphany, as it were, happened. I remember how awesome it felt when the buoyancy and the trim all fell into place. I remember coming up thinking; wow...I actually got to see some stuff and enjoy the dive without having to concentrate only on staying trim and off the bottom. All of you "elite" instructors out there think back. How many people over the age of 35 or so have made this comment: I look back at the things I did as a kid, and I'm lucky to be alive."???? Anybody ever said that? The same goes with diving. I look back at how bad I was on my first 10-15 dives and it's a wonder I ever got the hang of it. We dive for a living. These people come down and dive 1 maybe 2 weeks a year. I dive more in a week than 80% of the diving population does in 5 years. Let's get off our high horse for just a moment or two and show some humility.

What's humility got to do with it? How about asking yourself if you are truly doing your students a disservice by training them to such a low standard? The reason why so many divers end up like the ones in that video is because so many of their instructors view such habits as "normal".

Do you honestly believe that's what the agency you represent has in mind?

I just love how the word "elite" gets trotted out by those who don't see anything wrong with certifying divers who have no buoyancy control, who can't move around without waving their hands all over the place, who trash the reef with their fins, and who can't even manage a dive without holding onto someone else's hand.

Is this what you consider the "mastery" of the skills your agency requires you to teach these people before handing them a c-card? What I see in that video may not violate the letter of the standards of your agency and mine ... but it violates the hell out of what they were intended to accomplish.

If the instructor doesn't believe that someone coming out of OW can do better than that, their students sure as hell aren't going to believe it either ... because they'll have never been told that they should.

I don't attempt to train my students to be "elite" divers ... but I do my darndest to teach them how to be competent ones. And if they can't demonstrate some reasonable level of comfort and competence by the time we get to the checkout dives, I don't fault the students for that ... and I sure don't fault the agency ... I fault the instructor for setting such low expectations ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[carrielsal]

I'm glad I wasn't the only one staring at that part of the video. That was insane!

When I was a new diver, I had a DM in Cancun hand me a scorpion fish. I had no idea what is was until I got back home and looked it up.

 

[TSandM]

Although I am very willing to accept that this group was diving as a group, rather than in teams, I do want to make the observation that, had anyone snapped random photographs of our dives in Cozumel, you might not have been able to discern precisely which divers comprised each team. But as I believe the DM observed, the teams behaved as though they were attached by invisible rubber bands -- they would stretch enough to allow someone to deviate to look at something, but the awareness was always there, and separations never exceeded a certain distance (might have been as much as 20 feet at times). But any random picture could easily not have shown the structure underlying that moment of time.

 

[Diver0001]

.....

 

[ptyx]

How about asking yourself if you are truly doing your students a disservice by handing training them to such a low standard? The reason why so many divers end up like the ones in that video is because so many of their instructors view such habits as "normal".

What do I dive for?
Explore the environment. Relax. Learn about the ecosystem. Have fun. Enjoy the challenge of both the dives and the training. And there is a social part as well, even if I'm a bear.

That's the kind of divers traditional dive training is aimed at. And the better instructors/agencies will end up training that kind of divers. All good.

But there is also the 'activity' diver. The tourist who's never in the water, see a 'dive' entry on his all inclusive resort program and thinks that it sounds like fun. For him, diving is no different than a snorkeling trip, a bus tour to the volcano or a horse ride.

Get 5 minutes instruction. Climb on a lobotomized horse. Get pissed at it because it only thinks about eating. Hope it follows the horse in front of you for the whole ride, because if you get separated you'll have no clue how to tell the beast where you want to go. Go back to your hotel with a smile and a sore bottom, thinking that was fun but you'll do something else tomorrow. And don't think about the horse you traumatized again (those poor horses are brain dead, but they don't get much better treatment than the reef in the video).

I'm sure that kind of horse riding gets a lot of people mad. But it's there and not going away anytime soon.

I think that's where a good part of the dive industry is headed. Snuba without the hose. Unless an agency gets suddenly slapped with a million dollars class action lawsuit because they are directly responsible for misleading customers or damaging the environment, it's there to stay. The problem is: how to make that kind of diving as safe as it can get, as respectful of the environment as possible, and how not to dilute our kind of diving.

Do you honestly believe that's what the agency you represent has in mind?

That is a great question. Whether it is their goal or not to encourage the kind of diving we see in that video, they allow it to happen don't they? It's easy to blame the local operation or instructor, but when the problem is widespread, licenses are never pulled, there is barely any quality control, and standards violations are no longer an exception then the agency is at least guilty of hypocrisy.

I don't attempt to train my students to be "elite" divers ... but I do my darndest to teach them how to be competent ones.

You're training divers. Not giving tourists the shortest possible safety briefing before they can have one hour of fun in the water.

 

[Lorenzoid]

. . .
But there is also the 'activity' diver. The tourist who's never in the water, see a 'dive' entry on his all inclusive resort program and thinks that it sounds like fun. For him, diving is no different than a snorkeling trip, a bus tour to the volcano or a horse ride.

Get 5 minutes instruction. Climb on a lobotomized horse. Get pissed at it because it only thinks about eating. Hope it follows the horse in front of you for the whole ride, because if you get separated you'll have no clue how to tell the beast where you want to go. Go back to your hotel with a smile and a sore bottom, thinking that was fun but you'll do something else tomorrow. And don't think about the horse you traumatize twice again (those poor horses are brain dead, but they don't get much better treatment than the reef in the video).

I'm sure that kind of horse riding gets a lot of people mad. But it's there and not going away anytime soon.

I think that's where a good part of the dive industry is headed. Snuba without the hose. Unless an agency gets suddenly slapped with a million dollars class action lawsuit because they are directly responsible for misleading customers or damaging the environment, it's there to stay. The problem is: how to make that kind of diving as safe as it can get, as respectful of the environment as possible, and how not to dilute our kind of diving.

Excellent observations and analogies.

I think you're correct and also think there's little wrong with it, other than that the agencies may be moving a little faster than the development of their training techniques and scuba technology might allow. It seems to me that the ultimate goal of the training agencies' Open Water programs is indeed to make "activity diving" possible. To find that lowest common denominator in training and equipment that enables diving by the "activity diver" to be as safe as the proverbial ride on the lobotomized horse, trip to a volcano, etc. Yes, it's "snuba without the hose" (I like that). If the agencies are moving toward making diving as safe a recreational activity as any other that's offered at those all-inclusive resorts, isn't that a good thing? They're not there yet, as you observe, but hopefully they will get there without the lawsuits.

 

[cmaha76]

That was probably me on my first dive trip ever... to Cozumel. The only difference in my mind was that I knew I was bad, had cruddy bouyancy control so I stayed a nice safe distance from other divers and the reef. It's easy to write-off this behavior as typical vacation diver, but I don't think that's fair to those of us that only dive on vacation and still try to get better. My buddy and I do drills on safety stops and hit an occasional shore dive just to practice drills. Every once in awhile we'll hit the pool to refresh a bit, especially if it's been more than 6 months between trips. It's going to take me a lot longer to become the diver I want/can be because I only dive once or twice a year on vacation, but at the same time I've developed decent trim and bouyancy, i practice my drills mask removal, reg retrieveal, air sharing & equipment removal/replacement.

I've got a lot of work to do, but you can become a better diver even if you only dive on vacation. In my mind these people are either brand new and some of the behavior is to be expected, or they just don't give a crap. I think you're going to find a higher percentage of "don't give a crap" divers in the vacation diver pool, but not all of us operate that way.

 

[*dave*]

You're training divers. Not giving tourists the shortest possible security briefing before they can have one hour of fun in the water.

Unfortunately, the card Bob's students earn and the one each of the divers in the video were issued don't make that distinction.

As an instructor, I've always figured my best gauge of success is the quality and quantity of dives my students are doing. My success as an instructor is important to me, so my student's success is important to me. I strive to put out the best divers I can and am moderately successful, but will continue to improve.

On the other hand, I've known an instructor whose primary measure of success was the number of students he'd certified. His course never evolved and his students never had much of a chance to reach their potential, but most of them had a great time.

Then, there are those who do this for a living in vacation destinations. I suspect a great deal of their motivation is basic survival, much as any job would be. They likely won't see the student again after checkouts, so what motivation do they have to put out solid divers? More to the point, how can they put out solid divers in the time they have been allowed?

I think they should tighten the standards for OW certs and push the masses who want to dive on vacation towards a certification that limits where they dive and requires direct supervision by a professional. Of course, that will never happen.