Ocean Gladiator: Part1

By Mark Ellyat on 23 August 2008

All At Sea

I thought scuba would be exciting, but drifting in the choppy seas midway between Cancun and Cozumel was more seasick and sunburn than adrenaline packed adventure. I started my diving course just one day earlier and already I was going to end up as a shark snack. Yesterday was spent mostly filling out forms and trying on equipment to fill time while we waited for the instructor to arrive. There were six others in the group – five from the States or Canada, I guessed from the accents, plus myself. When she did turn up, Instructor Karen introduced herself and made some excuses for the delay. By way of apology she offered us the chance to complete the course in two days instead of three, getting us back on schedule. Adding there would be no need for practice sessions in a swimming pool, or time wasted in classrooms, this was going to be a fast track scuba course for quick learners. We all agreed that this sounded like us. Karen said that despite being so quick, it was perfectly safe – this was in fact the way the whole world learned to dive, apparently. Our first session began straight from the shore, with underwater skills such as clearing water from our masks and sharing our air supplies discussed via frantic shouting as we bobbed up and down in the heavy surf.

The looks on my fellow novice divers faces as we slipped beneath the ocean for the first time were mostly of agony. Karen the instructor kept touching her nose and squealing loudly through her breathing regulator as everybody headed for the bottom. Some of the group mimicked the nose pointing, I could not see how this would help. Feeling no pain, I just dropped down to the seabed and watched. I think the rest of the group were having problems clearing their ears from the effects of the pressure. The Instructor was gesturing to me frantically from above. She seemed to be actually pulling the daisy chain of divers down with her. All these grown men were even holding hands with each other. Most of the group were kicking their flippers like they were riding bicycles and using their free arm in a breast stroke swimming style. Some clearly looked as if they would rather go back up than down.

I looked up at this gaggle being dragged down towards me with amazement. It looked like some of the guys were experiencing their first day at school, they definitely didn’t want to let go of mum’s hand now. I remember thinking scuba diving must be like learning to use contact lenses or giving birth – it can be quite messy at the beginning and potentially embarrassing, but hopefully worth persevering with. After about ten minutes of kneeling on the sand watching the antics above me, Instructor Karen started giving me the thumbs up sign, I felt fine and returned the same signal. This thumb’s up signal was repeated many times, and I did it back as often as I could. She let the other divers go and they bobbed straight back up to the surface. Karen started to swim down towards me. Thinking it would just be the two of us going diving, I started to swim down the nearby slope.

The others in the group seemed happier floundering at the surface, some looked like they were treading grapes. I kicked my flippers up and down as fast as I could. I was creating quite a dust storm behind me, clearly startling some kind of grey flat fish. Suddenly something grabbed me from behind, stopping me in my tracks. I recognised Instructor Karen’s arm as it jabbed out from behind my head and quickly started to inflate my buoyancy jacket. All the extra air affected my buoyancy and within seconds I shot to the surface resembling a swollen puffer fish. Elated that my first dive was such a success, I thanked the instructor for the experience. She seemed lost for words and just shook her head. I imagine that these special moments were just the reward she sought, seeing land lubbers like me taking their first deep breaths underwater. I mentioned that the experience left me quite speechless, Karen looked around at some of my fellow aquanauts in the group, some of which were bleeding from the nose, she just muttered in agreement “truly amazing” continuing to shake her head.

Dive two of the course would be less threatening for me than the rest, as I was the only one in our group that dived properly the day before. I prepared for the next dive with excitement and apprehension, my girlfriend Clare lent me her diving book and I studied it all that night. In the morning two of the group decided that scuba diving was not for them, the instructor heartily agreed with their wise decision. Our group of six had dwindled to four now, plus Karen, our patient mentor. The waves from yesterday had abated and we all swam out into the blue azure of the Caribbean Sea.

We swam over a reef in 20 feet of water. Everybody saw the turtle and the Barracuda reef shark. We learned that the thumbs up from the instructor meant that it was time to go back to the surface and not “I’m fine too, thanks”. After 20 minutes or so we all agreed to ascend, as now two of the group were sharing air as one had run out. I had the surfacing skill practiced now and could ascend effortlessly by pressing the ‘up button’ on my buoyancy vest. Although I had actually left the seabed last, I quickly caught up and ended up on the surface even BEFORE my instructor. I was grinning from ear to ear as now this was all too easy. Karen reminded me to go the surface slower as this kept the group closer together. I hoped that Dive three would as good as number two.

That afternoon, we boarded a boat with at least 30 other divers. Many divers were talking about dive tables and their duels with the deep. I sat and listened to a knowledgeable looking chap who explained that this would be a drift dive and that the currents today would be very strong and exciting. This sounded excellent to me, though my Instructor Karen said that this guy was full of crap and that the current would, in fact, be quite mild. The sea was choppy and the wind was making the tops of some of the waves quite white. The two hour boat ride took its toll on many and some faces were looking as green as the sea…mine included.

About 15 minutes from the dive site I started to be sick. I was sick as secretly as possible, but after two mouthfuls of sick swallowed back down, the next one erupted like a geyser from hell. It ended up in the equipment bag of the loudmouth man, who now looked as nauseous as me. I looked up through my streaming eyes and offered a nod of reparation to the stranger. He just swallowed and closed his eyes quickly. A second later his eyes were wide like saucers and he was sick. I was getting the stare of the seasick brethren from all corners of the boat. This look is one of total abandonment and acceptance of any situation. Many would have given anything to get off this boat now. Someone upwind was sick. Luckily the sea spray in the air concealed most of it, but it was best to keep your mouth shut just in case. Nausea is the worst feeling, it’s a wonder why people get on boats at all. When you get seasick it can be enough to never visit water deeper than a bathtub again. For the worst afflicted, even a trip on an escalator can trigger the telltale yawning and salivating feeling. Such people would never contemplate a trip to Venice much less a Nile cruise. Today I was one of these retching wretched, hurling up my lunch everywhere.

The captain rang a bell to tell us it was dive time. I was being sick properly now, two or three times a minute at least. Karen the consummate dive professional asked me to get ready to dive. She added that as soon as I got under the water I would feel brand new, and that the boat was the last place I needed to be. Quite compassionately Karen intimated that those who didn’t dive would have to pay again to complete the diving course, as it was our own faults we were sick – she did tell us to look at the horizon after all, and the seasick tablets she was selling were only a dollar each. These soothing words were all I needed to put my equipment on.

Dropping down the seventy to eighty feet to the bottom was fairly eventful. I learnt how to puke underwater many times. All around me, yellow tailed snapper fish snapped at my breakfast. I saw my fellow adventurers’ cart-wheeling along the seabed, and watching my somersaulting buddies turned my stomach even faster until it felt like the spinning drum of a washing machine. I heard a pinging noise and it sounded pretty frantic. Instructor Karen was using her tank banger (a large metal nut on a loop of elastic) to signal everyone. She used this a lot yesterday to get people’s attention. It was her signal for us to look at a fish, or just to wake up!

The current underwater was moving along at breakneck speed. The rocks and reefs below skipped past me like a set of rapids. I wanted to stop, but as I planted my flippers in the boulders I was flung over and over again. My vomiting had turned into a predictable routine, and now the potentially jamming lumps had turned into a nasty green liquid. This meant I didn’t have to take my breathing regulator out in time to the retching. This skill would prove to be very useful in twelve years time. I got a handhold eventually, and managed to stop my gymnastic twirls. I waited on the bottom watching other divers being whisked off by the current. A minute later I was alone, the distant tank banging now a memory as distracting as a watch ticking. I waited for some time, my nausea slowly lifted just as Karen had said it would. I guess Instructors had to know all this stuff.

Scuba diving was proving very challenging to say the least. I decided that I could take it or leave it really. If I wanted to feel this sick and helpless, I would rather not have to pay for the privilege. My first two training dives were lucky escapes, culminating in this very unpleasant regurgatory purgatory experience. Could it get any worse? I only wanted to learn to scuba dive properly because of my girlfriend Clare. She had got certified a couple of weeks prior to me – throughout the course I got a running commentary as she raved about the turtles and dolphins in crystal clear Caribbean seas. I had only seen rough seas, no dolphins, and my life flash before me several times. The only fish life I saw were the yellow snappers that voraciously pecked at my breakfast, freshly ejected from the pit of my stomach.

Prior to Mexico, we sought tuition at our local diving club in North London. We eagerly endured all the marathon swimming bouts, and the constant insults from our megaphone-touting instructor who dripped with clipboards and binoculars. We mastered the club’s scuba equipment, most of it clearly used during hull inspections of Noah’s Ark. We relished our evenings of paddling through balls of hair and soggy sticking plasters, duelling with ravenous cracked pool tiles. Without notice, the local council ended our dream. The sports centre was closed down by health inspectors, as virtually every scuba session ended in a bout of gastroenteritis for all concerned. We decided to wait to get some training in sunnier climes from a more professional outfit. My current perilous underwater situation was the fruit spawned from that naïve decision. During the next fourteen years, and 3000 dives later, I’m reminded virtually every day that ‘professional’ and ‘scuba instructor’ are mutually exclusive terms.

Remember…I’m still underwater at this point, alone and getting low on my air supply. It was time to return to the sunlight 80 feet above me. Less than a minute later I threw my mask off and gasped some fresh air. I was expecting to see the bucking bronco dive boat nearby. To my disbelief, the boat was nowhere to be seen and I could not see a soul anywhere. I span around a few times to see what was on the horizon. In the distance was the Cozumel coastline, I couldn’t see where we had come from. But I did notice, a few hundred yards away, an orange tube floating and decided to swim towards it. I remembered the orange tube from a picture in the diving manual, it looked like a divers signalling sausage. This orange balloon seemed to be moving away from me, but twenty minutes later I caught up with it. Thankfully I’d met up with two others that had also missed the bus home. Karen, my instructor, was one of them and the other was an inconsolable lady from Hawaii. As the hours passed, our spirits dropped. The rawness of sunburn on our faces overtook the feeling of nausea. We twisted around at every shark sighting, but it was always a false alarm. This diving course was pretty much atrocious, and now I was going to be lost at sea, this icing on the cake tasted very bitter.

I don’t know how many hours we waited, but being lost at sea does teach you to be patient. The first 30 minutes are hardest; the next 2 hours seem to fly by really, it’s important not to look at the time. Without a time frame, it’s easy to lose track of the hours and this kept the wolf of panic further from our doors. We didn’t say too much at all to each other. Karen asked if we were okay on the hour, every hour, and the other woman just whimpered a lot. The dive boat did eventually come back. Apparently they noticed the equipment missing from the rental stock firstly, and then noticed that instructor Karen was on the earlier boat roster. Thankfully her name was not added in pencil. It was a tense three hours back to the dive centre. Again, nothing was said the whole time. It was all a bit surreal, the staff at the dive shop laughed and joked like it was just an everyday occurrence. It did occur to me that perhaps this was, just an everyday occurrence at this dive centre. We were supposed to do another dive that afternoon, to complete our training. I didn’t really fancy another round and was relieved when Karen said we should postpone it as it had been a long day. The instructor never showed for work the next day. I signed some paperwork and was refunded a few dollars for the course not being finished properly. My diver’s certification card was sent to me in the post, but I didn’t use it again for 12 months.

A holiday in Barbados was my next chance to match my poorly applied diving instruction against the might of the ocean. I walked into a dive centre, imaginatively called The Dive Shop. I showed them my valid-for-life diving card. This piece of laminated cardboard allowed me to dive at any open water dive site without supervision, as long as I was accompanied by a buddy with at least similar experience – I hoped that this would not be the case today. I mentioned that my last dive was to eighty feet and that I was a bit rusty. I added that seized was a better description. Within an hour we were off, wedged in a small open speed boat bouncing along at 30 knots towards the wreck Stavronikita. The dive guide was also the boat captain. He shouted some instructions but his voice was no match for the din of the outboard motor. The wreck sat upright in one hundred and thirty feet of water. It was still intact and was apparently safe for all divers. The driver muttered that we had arrived at the position, and without another word, slipped over the side. I introduced myself to my apparent dive partner for today. She had a look resembling a rabbit caught in the headlights. It turned out that Anna hailed from Norway, and had just completed her diving course the day before. This was her first dive without an instructor. It reassured her to learn that I had finished my course the previous year. If she found that piece of information comforting, we were indeed in trouble! What reassured me was our proximity to shore and that the sea was calm. I neither felt seasick nor anxious, and if the dive boat mysteriously sank or was impounded by the authorities for its un-seaworthy appearance, I could easily manage the swim back to terra-firma. We helped each other on with our equipment and Anna reminded me of the equipment checks. She rolled over the side backwards. I thought that technique was a little advanced, so attempted to stand up and just leap over the side. After my ungainly entrance we were ready for action.

Dropping back down under water after so long felt very strange. But the visibility underwater went on forever and I was overwhelmed by the electrifying blue and tranquillity of it all. The grey hull of the shipwreck came into view just below the surface. The huge Greek freighter teemed with fish of all shapes and sizes. I felt weightless and without a care. The dive guide reappeared now and gestured that we should drop inside one of the holds of the ship. I swam over to this black rectangular area and the three of us dropped inside. I signalled to my buddy, she seemed to be enjoying things as much as myself. As we descended into the vast hold, it got quite dark. Our dive guide swam ahead to point out a hole in the side of the ship that led outside. The swim through was fantastic and for the first time I felt like a proper diver. Our underwater sheep dog then turned downwards to the seabed and we both followed without question. I checked my depth gauge and was amazed to see we had reached one hundred and twenty feet. I saw a shoal of big silver fish and turned around to Anna to point them out. She looked in the right direction, but at the same moment a look of horror spread across her face as the breathing regulator fell from her mouth. The soft rubber mouthpiece that you bite on to keep the equipment in your mouth was still between her teeth but the regulator and hose piece were missing. The cable tie that secured the two pieces had obviously fallen off, it was just a matter of time until a drama ensued.

Anna pounced on me like a cat on a mouse, grabbing the breathing regulator from my own mouth. I reached down and unclipped the spare regulator that dangled from my buoyancy jacket. I put the regulator in my mouth and felt relieved and pleased that we had fixed the problem ourselves. Scuba diving is apparently as dangerous as ten-pin bowling, a fact I had read several times. This little gem probably helps the insurance underwriters sleep soundly at night, but it was no consolation when a split second later my buddy and I ran out of air, one hundred feet below the surface. I learned afterwards from the comical dive guide that the diving equipment used for customer rental goes through a schedule of maintenance that should attract anyone considering suicide.

Indeed ‘routine’ and ‘servicing’ are dirty words throughout much of the dive industry. Since this day I’ve noticed that many scuba shops simply follow the mantra ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t try and fix it’.

When you cannot breathe underwater, it’s natural to think the worst. I’m fairly pragmatic, but my buddy fell into the role of headless chicken almost immediately. We started swimming up – quickly. As we got closer to the surface, we were delivered a reprieve. My diving regulator started to supply air again, although at an asthmatic rate. It was similar to sucking a cat through a drinking straw, not so noisy but with all the difficulty. However, by the time we reached 20 feet, we were back on easy street and breathing normally. We slowed down and took a minute to hit the surface. Anna looked like she had seen a ghost, but calmed down quickly once back in the boat. We had arranged for two dives, Anna said that one was enough for today. I still fancied it, and Julian our guide said he would take me in again alone. We drove some way towards home to an underwater reef called ‘Pieces of Eight” in sixty feet of water. Anna asked how long we would wait before diving again. I hoped not long as the sun was scorching, I wanted to go straight away. We exchanged our empty scuba tanks for fresh ones. Julian slipped over the side again without warning. I tried the backward roll entry technique, which I had seen earlier. Doing a little somersault, although fun, was slightly disorientating. I got my bearings and headed down. Julian was there, near the bottom. There was a giant fishing net stretched right out in front of him. My dive buddy was pulling fish from the net and letting them go. This was fun and we spent the next thirty minutes liberating small reef fish. We did struggle for a while as we tried to break the netting – I had to rest to get my breath back several times. This dive lasted close to forty minutes, we saw everything. Lion fish, turtles and a myriad of colourful reef dwellers. With all the distractions, it would be easy to miss monitoring my air pressure. Julian kept a watch out and he signalled that we should ascend when it was time. On the way up, his wrist computer started beeping. He wanted to stop for a bit just below the surface. I tried to stop too but the air in my buoyancy jacket had expanded too much and I sped past him. Julian beckoned me back down. I couldn’t get the air from my jacket and was stuck at the surface floundering. Anna shouted over, asking if we had a good dive, I headed over to the boat to tell her everything.

Ten minutes later, Julian surfaced also. It had been a great day. In no time we were back to the dive centre and booked another dive trip for tomorrow. We explained about the running out of air episode to the boss. The shop manager explained that we should take more responsibility for our own safety and to check the equipment before use. He pointed to some little filter embedded inside my rental regulator. It was as green as the grass outside. He advised that it should be grey or silver and my instructor should have told me how to check this. Green meant it was almost completely blocked and would only give enough air for one person. He continued that there were many sets of regulators and that he alone could not be accountable for ensuring that they all worked. He blamed people like us for rinsing the regulators in the fresh water without the dust cap in place. I felt very tired all of a sudden and headed back to the hotel. I started to feel a pain in my legs about half an hour later.

Stopping at a fried chicken vendor, I sipped a juice and took a painkiller washed down with a side of B-B-Q ribs. My head started to throb and my legs were becoming weaker. I phoned the dive centre for advice, they suggested that I was experiencing heat exhaustion and was obviously dehydrated. I returned to the hotel for a lie down. A few minutes later I must have dozed off, but I woke with a start to the feeling of ants running all over my chest. Turning the light on and stumbling to the shower, I turned the water on. There were no ants, but instead a purple rash had covered my chest and arms. Maybe it was ants, but if so they had strangely gone now leaving no trace. I rubbed some E45 anti-aging cream into my chest and lay down again. That was two in the afternoon.

The next day at seven in the evening, I woke up to knocking on my door. I had forgotten I’d arranged to go to a cabaret show at a plantation museum with friends. I could just about summon the energy to shout a response to the caller. My knees were very painful and I struggled to put my legs on the floor. It felt like I had run a marathon in my sleep and then fought in a bar fight. I focussed and got up, all the recent excitement and my fast approaching twenty four years old must be catching up with me, I thought. Jenny my niece came into my room, she mentioned that a dive centre had come calling for me earlier in the day, but I didn’t hear them banging. I felt very weak and very rough. I needed food and drink and some distraction. Several rum punches and some sustenance later, I felt myself a little more. At eleven thirty in the evening, I had been entered into a limbo dancing competition. I stood swaying before the waist height bar, which was now doused with Sambuca and burning merrily. My knees were on fire also – if I made it under this bar it would be a flaming miracle indeed! Moving forward under the bar meant arching my back and bending my knees. I had as much flexibility as the Leaning Tower of Pisa now. I collapsed on the floor to drunken applause and was helped from the stage. The pain stayed in my legs for ages after.

Flying home, I went to the doctors for relief. The doc asked what I had been doing before the pain started. I told him “nothing really, except for some scuba diving”. When I told him more about the diving drama, he consulted a dusty medical journal about Caisson’s disease. The symptoms I presented were those of residual decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends. I had heard of the bends from the movies, you got them if you wore the big brass helmets and came to the surface too fast. My whirlwind diver training made no mention of decompression illness. The rapid ascent with Anna had probably caused bubbles in my body. This explained a lot. I should have gone directly to a diver’s recompression chamber in Barbados and got treated immediately. The dive shop guy had said I was just hungry and thirsty. The pain in my legs slowly resolved over the weeks but was quickly replaced with a more throbbing pain in the arse, my job.

I wanted a change from my current career of ducking and diving in the second hand car trade to something a bit less cut throat. I considered all manner of adventurous careers, including helicopter pilot and even North Sea commercial diver. I went out and bought a glossy diving magazine for more ideas. The glamorous and seemingly amorous lifestyle of the diving professional drew me like a fly to a windscreen. Within a fortnight I had enrolled in a zero-to-hero dive training special. Looking at my certification card, the dive shop guy noticed I had already been diving three years – that apparently made me an experienced diver! My new diving Instructor had been diving only six months himself, and he added (worryingly) that I could probably teach him a thing or two. These next few weeks would see me enrolled in the largest diver training school in England. It was February or March so it made for a winter training discount. I moved from my townhouse in a salubrious north London suburb, to a dilapidated caravan adjacent to the opaquely turquoise waters of a gravel pit.

How the on-site accommodation was advertised would stretch the most elastic imagination. The interior photographs had faded a lot in the sunshine, or came from an era before coloured ink. I endured a week staying in this damp freezing poverty, sharing with one guy whose snoring could keep a deaf person awake. My other ‘cellmate’ was the instructor, who had a serious night time teeth-grinding habit. I was surprised every morning that he had any teeth left. The bottled gas fire that smoked like burning car tyres had to be extinguished on entry due to carbon monoxide scares. Homeless tramps with mangy dogs would never rest their heads on these mouldy damp mattresses. These quaint diver’s chalets resembled cardboard slums on wheels. Although costing just five quid a night, this was still daylight robbery. The adverts said that each caravan boasted a rustic, waters edge convenience. In no time, I realised that convenience was meant in the urinal sense of the word. The diving company was proud to offer its sub-aqua adventures from two locations. I did my Advanced Diver course in a swamp near Birmingham, followed by Rescue training back at the murky brick quarry near Cambridgeshire.

During my training, I sampled daily money-wasting and pointless antics at the hands of would-be dive professionals. On the very first day, we learnt how to deep dive safely within the strict guidelines of the training agency. However, this version of deep diving was never actually deeper than 19 metres at any time, and swimming at this depth was strictly prohibited. We simply held onto a length of chain that hung from the edge of the quarry. Our next high-octane-adventure would be boat diving. The dive centre boasted about its very own boat. The promotional materials showed a boat being used for rescue and safety demonstrations. The boat photos contained someone resembling Jack Cousteau wearing very vintage equipment, so was clearly taken a few years back. The boat had definitely seen better days, as now it was a dilapidated inflatable dinghy that had been nailed to some planks of wood. Its floorboards were screwed to these planks, and thus it was fixed permanently to the edge of the quarry. Only half of the boat was capable of inflation, but this allowed for easy access when wearing fins. We were to simulate (pretend) that we had travelled to the dive site by boat. On the instructors command, we were to roll over backwards into the muddy water. We could then explore some dumped cars and shopping trolleys and then return to the dive boat. I couldn’t wait for the Drift dive experience in the quarry. I thought we would just simulate ocean currents by jumping into the water without our flippers on. The instructor scoffed at my contemptuous remarks, quoting how good he was and that he had never ever dived outside this quarry. “The sea is over-rated” he would repeat, “Everything you need is in this inland oasis”. It was hard to detect sarcasm or irony in his profundity, his Birmingham accent was just too concealing. After all this in-depth training, I felt truly an advanced diver capable of rescuing any distressed damsels that swam my way.

Before diving, like I said I sold cars in London, both new and used. During this time I had business dealings with gentlemen from Yakuza families, Al-Qaeda pilots, and several members of “semi-organised” crime families. At no time however, did these men or women stoop as low with their business ethics as the staff from my ‘five star’ diving centre. During my dive master training course, one of my fellow dive instructor lemmings developed a burst lung, I think it was technically called a mediastinal emphysema, it still sounded nasty. This guy had apparently worked previously as a commercial diver but lost his medical clearance to dive professionally due to, strangely enough, bursting his lung. When I started on this leadership level training, this chap joked to everyone that he had burst his lung at work, and was forced to leave. His new plan was to continue working under the water as a ‘mere’ scuba instructor instead, this sounded reasonable to me, and it sounded reasonable to our instructor.

A couple of days later, when he was carted away in an ambulance, the owner of the dive centre came up to me minutes before the police arrived and asked if I would forget the conversation about yes’s and no’s that we had discussed during the completion of our diving self-medicals. Apparently life and death decisions are worth only £300 in diving, when I sold cars this level of injury usually involved much more money. Still, I was not put off my path of joining the ranks of the diving professional. I completed my dive master course, and applied for my diving Instructor training. Within a couple of weeks I was sitting on my instructor development course, albeit at a competitors dive centre. I was going to give the first dive centre another thousand pounds for this tuition, but after a near drowning (my own) due to a leaking rental drysuit compounded by hired-free flowing regulators, I decided that enough was enough.

The course you undertake to become a dive instructor is quite enjoyable, both highly sociable and fun. It involves learning to teach a contrived and minimised teaching system. But this system is quite alien to common sense. It’s a bit like learning a foreign language, but with a big difference – what you say is not important, only the grammar is key. Usually when you thread a few new foreign words together, the listener overlooks improper grammar, focussing purely on the important part. Often, new instructors still do not understand the important parts themselves as they have only been diving a short time. During the instructor training, the candidate gives presentations that are graded. The instructor could tell you all sorts of potentially dangerous information, but score enough points to pass by hiding the rubbish within the guidelines of the teaching system. Foreign language instructors are often provided with non-diving translators, this complements the lottery of the grading process nicely.

Imagine saying something like “In the United Kingdom we drive on the right side of the road”.

You could also say that “In the United States we drive on the right side of the road”.

Both sentences are grammatically correct, but explain nothing. Unless you actually know which side of the road to drive on beforehand, you will have a head on collision in England despite driving on the right side – the left…confused? You will be. My point was that new diving instructors leaving training have only learned a framework in which to teach. If the underpinning facts are misunderstood or downright dangerous, that’s the way they will stay, sadly. While underwater, the details and facts keep you alive, not the way they were presented. I don’t want to go on about just how shoddy diving instructors can be, but if training agencies want to endanger lives proportionally to increasing profits, then it won’t be long until major government intervention and much needed regulation.

My Instructors course started smoothly, the group numbered about seventeen and we all had a good laugh. An unexpected bonus was that if you pretended to be unemployed and did a few nights additional paperwork, you could have the course for free. This special offer came courtesy of the U.K government, as part of another new initiative to waste tax payer’s money. I thought this was a good deal, so I took up the challenge, as did more than half the class. They even supplied a bus to take us down to the unemployment benefit office – we went from Social-Climbers to Social-Claimers in the same afternoon.

The next nine days were gruelling with all this additional free-course paperwork but great fun. My grasp of diving theory was as good as it needed to be and probably better than anyone else’s in the room though this hardly helped at all. Other candidates – who were barely coherent without alcohol and had clearly been studying for a completely different vocation – took on board the teaching system like kids to water, or more aptly, stoners to a bong. My brain seeks explanation rather than memory games. I sat alone in the evenings adding the contrived phrases to my vocabulary and trying to integrate them into my own diving knowledge database. The courses training director made the mistake of explaining the value of these techniques at the beginning of class. He said that nobody uses these methods during real diver training, ever. You simply had to remember the patter for the exam at the end and learn to high five when appropriate. As every Englishman knows, there is never an appropriate time to high five! I realised early on that becoming a diving instructor was as challenging as filling out credit card details, by the end of the course I was a fully certified diving instructor professional guru. I graduated with about fourteen of the others. We all spoke naively about lengthy careers as diving instructors. One year later, two or three were still working in the industry. One was cleaning the glass inside a large aquarium in the Midlands, another had graduated to the dizzying heights of leading snorkellers on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean.

Predictably, my fellow virtually-unemployed course-mates were caught red handed cheating with the government paperwork. Most had borrowed my coursework and had foolishly copied it verbatim. The myopic, but clearly eagle-eyed government verifier, sorted the wheat from the chaff quickly and mercilessly. He offered the choice of court room appearances or course payments in full. Credit card details appeared instantly on his table the same day, along with some muffled apologies. My own work was accepted fortunately, and I collected my winnings in the form of a free instructor course. Because of my total disregard for academic qualifications, I have had to endure the pitfalls of being a diving instructor for the past thirteen years now. Maybe I will collect the resulting sainthood for this when I parole from debtors prison…many years from now. A couple of weeks staggering around intoxicated from joining the ranks of the scuba-guru had to end. I got my first job in the industry, and a rude awakening…

Contact

Author: Mark Ellyat
Email: info@travel-dive.com

Article Comments

Alan says

Excerpts from a great book which I really enjoyed. Mark’s no-nonsense approach to diving is very addictive!