ScubaBrucie

 The following is an account of how I wasted a lot of money and over a week of my time to put up with a lot of harassment and grief. I have thought long and hard about whether I should post this and have discussed it with friends who say that I should. Some may say that it is sour grapes, that is up to them, I am merely documenting events from my perspective. I have done so as a warning for other divers. Please take great care when buying training. As you will see I didn’t take enough and have paid the consequence.

Nine years ago I did my PADI Cavern course at Salgar Diving in Menorca and really enjoyed it. I have been diving the caves and caverns of Menorca regularly ever since. Two years ago I did the IANTD Intro to Cave with Phil Short, also at Salgar Diving in Menorca. This was a fantastic course and Phil is a first class teacher. I learned a lot and really enjoyed it, so much so that I was determined to go on and get my full cave certification.

One huge problem with cave diving is the certification agencies, unfortunately there is no equivalent of PADI. The top standard (leaving GUE out) is supposed to be the National Association Of Cavedivers (NACD) and the National Spielogical Society Cave Diving Section (NSS CDS), both in America. The NACD qualification is necessary to dive the top Mexican sites and some American sites can only be dived if you are NSS CDS. Both of these organisations are pretty much unknown outside America so you also need a tech agency ticket and IANTD are the best for that. In other words if you want to travel and cave dive you need these three tickets and I found an instructor who could teach all three. Not only that, he was British and taught in Florida, the best place to learn. I will call this person CI for Cave Instructor. My massive mistake was to take him and his teaching at face value, I should have checked him out more. As it turned out he was the worst diving instructor that I have ever met. I knew from the second day of the course that he was going to fail to teach me well enough for me to get through. I would have known earlier but the first two dives were aborted when his DUI drysuit flooded through multiple holes, very unprofessional.

The main problem is that his teaching method is to berate you. Before, during and after every dive. It is like being a WW2 army recruit. He just did not support and instruct in the manner that I have experienced from every other diving instructor. Some people may find this works for them but it certainly does not work for me. I dive for fun and enjoyment, not to be treated like this. It is extremely wearisome to the soul to put up with this day after day. Another problem was that his telling offs bore only a scant resemblance to what had happened. For instance he told me off for “standing up” in a cave. A bit difficult when there was less than four foot of room and I am over six foot tall. What he meant was that my trim had gone a bit head up. Early on in the course I accidentally put my hand once into the mud on the cave floor. This got me not one, but several telling offs for the destruction and devastation I had wrought on the cave. I reached the point were I only turned half an ear to most of what he said, it was the only way to retain my sanity.

One time I was making a jump into a side tunnel. The gold line was very low, just above the mud floor, running between circular concrete blocks. I got down low with my buoyancy spot on and placed my cookie on the line. I then got a jump reel and looped it round the gold line. I was facing into the cave wall and needed to move myself back into the tunnel. I could have finned backwards but I reckoned there would be less chance of creating silt if I pushed back very gently off a concrete block, so I did. I got a massive telling off for this. CI said “what if it had been mud and not concrete?” well it wasn’t mud and if it had been I would have finned backwards instead of pushing back. I told other, experienced cave divers about this incident and they said that I had chosen the right option in not finning back so close to the mud on the bottom of the cave.

Every technical instructor has a different pre dive check routine. CI expected me to know his by telepathy and I got told off for not instantly memorising it when up to my neck in water in a spring. So I asked him to write it out in the classroom. This got me another telling off that I couldn’t bring a list with me on a dive. I explained that I just wanted it written down so I could memorise it. With this he did write it down, however he got it wrong and left out a key check. I didn’t bother telling him, I just added the check back in.

Every time I tried to explain why I had done a certain thing I was told I was making excuses. One time following CI out of a cave he dropped a pencil onto the cave floor mud and didn’t notice he had done so. I picked this up and handed it back to him when we were de kitting after the dive without saying anything. The excuses he came up with then were one of the highlights of the week.

When I did the Intro course with Phil Short we did a kit workshop which was excellent and necessary as cave diving is very kit intensive. I expected the same again at this higher level and didn’t get it. In fact I got zero response when I asked kit specific questions such as the height of my shoulder D rings and how best to bungee up my bellows pockets. What I did get was a long description of how customers who bough their equipment from his dive shop got the Rolls Royce treatment and that everything was tailored and fettled to the individual until it was perfect. The message was obvious, don’t expect any help if you bought your kit elsewhere, even if you are paying for a course.

One game I played when following him was snowstorms. Quite often his fins hit the cave ceiling in the low caves and a shower of limestone snowflakes would fall to the floor. I made sure that when I followed I made far less snowflakes. It is just a matter of buoyancy, trim and keeping a good look out where you are going.

Early on CI said to me that he doesn’t blow his own trumpet. I didn’t realise that he was being ironic. He spend the bulk of his conversations telling anyone who will listen a succession of Boys Own stories that are an attempt to make him look good. If anyone else has a story he will immediately come back with a bigger and better one about himself. In fact in all conversations he is doing the “my daddy is bigger than your daddy” schoolyard gambit to feed his ego, very tiring. His favourite boast, which I heard a lot, is “Tom Mount (the boss of IANTD) says I am the best cave instructor in the world”. Well I have news for Tom Mount, if he did say this he is very wrong. Another CI boast is “I have trained more rebreather cave divers than all other instructors put together”. And to give you an idea of his arrogance in one conversation he said that he always failed people learning on an Inspiration if they were using a non standard chassis.

One thing he constantly does is to rubbish, at length, other diving instructors. He told me lots of bad things about John Orlowski, Martyn Farr, John Thornton, Penny Glover (deceased) etc. Obviously he does this to make himself look good and feed his massive ego. One time he asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer. He said I should have been taught this on my Intro course so I said that I had forgotten. He said no, I hadn’t forgotten but that Phil Short hadn’t taught me it!! All this is incredibly unprofessional behaviour. In fact he doesn’t just rubbish instructors, he rubbishes most people and has certainly rubbished me to plenty of people.

 An example of how CI puts people down was a chat with Jill Heinerth, when she said she had been teaching in Russia he asked her if she spoke Russian, when she said no he said that he does and that it is essential to do so in order to teach there. But he doesn’t. He is learning Russian but told me that he is totally lost trying to understand spoken Russian at conversational speed. Afterwards I asked him about Jill being the first person to cave dive inside an iceberg and CI said that she had just swum underneath it, another put down. Look at this video and make your own mind up: http://www.evtv1.com/player.aspx?itemnum=5272

All week he was telling everyone that another UK instructor was coming out soon to teach an IANTD rebreather cave course and that he shouldn’t be allowed. He called this instructor Golden Boy. CI went on about this to every instructor he met, to some NSS CDS committee members, to the management of the divesites and to lots of other people. This was most unprofessional. In fact one instructor said to him that if CI had a problem then he should ring Tom Mount (the head of IANTD) and tell him. What that instructor probably realised is that CI was just going round rubbishing a competitor.

Also I got fed up with his general “know it all” ignorance. He told me that Egypt has “Shia” law, strange for a mainly Sunni country! What he probably meant was Sharia law, but even this would be wrong. Egypt’s law is ”based on English common law, Islamic law, and Napoleonic codes”. Another time we were talking to two female divers, one of whom had dived the Blue Holes in the Bahamas. I said Rob Parker died on a dive there and CI then said that I was wrong. So I asked CI where Rob Parker had died and he said in a sump somewhere. This time I wasn’t sure if he was just trying to put me down or if he was just plain wrong.

These technical courses are demanding so I like to be prepared. So for a month beforehand I swam 50 (and often more) lengths of the baths daily, losing a stone in weight in the process. I bought and fettled my equipment so it would be spot on using the book “Dress for Success” to ensure that everything was right. I rang CI and asked him about reading and told him I had the NSS Cave Diving Manual, he said that was OK and suggested no further reading. In Florida I noticed they had the NACD Cavern/Cave Workbook in the shop, I asked CI if I should buy this and was told that I already should have and could have bought it from his shop for £10. He sent me an equipment list before the course and obviously I made sure that I had everything on it including four regulators. Then during the course we were using 50% O2 for accelerated deco and I told him that my regulators were not oxygen clean. Obviously I got told off for this and was told that oxygen clean was on the equipment list. Well it wasn’t. I have just double checked. If it had of been I would have brought an O2 clean stage with me. As it was I had to hire one out there.

Now we come to the absolute peak of his behaviour and some of you will not believe that CI did this. On the last day I could not find my logbook in the classroom and asked CI if he had seen it and he said no. This turned out to be a complete lie. I searched the classroom and then the shop where I eventually found my logbook hidden. When I opened it I found that someone had taken a pair of scissors to it and had cut out the signatures from every page of the course. Well this he could not deny! It really does give you a measure of the ego and schoolyard mentality of CI.

Now for balance I will tell you that I do not deserve the Full Cave ticket. After 8 days of one on one instruction CI failed to get my skills up to the required level. There are two issues and he pretty much failed to address either. The first is that my drysuit buoyancy is not perfect, mainly when line laying. In a wetsuit I have passed the GUE Fundementals but a drysuit requires different skills. By the end of the course I could hold any position motionless even in the shallows but this is still not up to the level I have done in a wetsuit. My second problem was valve drills. Once again I could do these by the end of the week but not to the standard I have done in a wetsuit. Now both of these problems must be fairly common. Did CI work on them? Not really, except for the continual telling offs. I only improved these skills by practicing them on my own during safety and deco stops. What CI was doing instead was getting me to fin through countless thousands of feet of tunnel, an area where I had no problems whatsoever. In fact a woman came up to me in the car park and apologised for shining her torch in my eyes when we passed in a low and silty tunnel (Peacock 1 Crossover) she then went on to compliment me on how very clean we had left the passage with zero silt suspended in the water.

One day an experienced American cave diver asked me how the course was going. So I told him. He then told me that CI has a reputation in Florida for being very hard on his students and for telling Boys Own stories all the time and that he personally would never do a course with CI because he didn’t want to be treated that way. If only I had known.

So the lesson here is to be very, very careful when choosing an instructor for the huge commitment you have to make at this level. Talk to them a lot beforehand and talk to some of their students. I have done a lot of courses including trimix to the full 90 metre ticket and have qualified as a PADI instructor myself so know how instructing should be done. I have been fortunate enough to have good, supportive instructors. CI is the first disaster. In fact it really is a great pity that there is not a PADI like certifying agency for cave to ensure instructor quality and weed out bad practices. Too much is left to the individual instructor at this level. Maybe DSAT will get round to it one day. I should have done just the IANTD course with Phil Short who I know to be very good. Or perhaps chosen an American instructor who dives the caves there all the time. We bumped into John Orlowski a few times and it struck me how good he was with his student, really communicating his passion for the caves.