ScubaBrucie

 It is now 4 months since my disaster and I thought that it was time to reflect from a distance.

There are three seperate elements to doing what my instructor does. Being a diver, being an explorer and being a teacher.

Firstly as a diver he is very good. He should be, the amount of time he spends in the water and the training he has had. He is not the best I have seen, but then I have seen some excellent divers. His weakness, as I said in my original piece, is his tendancy to fin low ceilings, creating a shower of limestone snow as he goes along.

 As an explorer I have no idea. I know that I wouldn’t go near any of his exploration. The problem is the continual, boastful war stories he tells of his exploits. I have never come across this before in a diver with substantial exploratory achievements under their belt. That he need to make these boasts all the time indicates the position of diving in his ego and this is why I wouldn’t go.

 As a teacher he is terrible. The worst I have come across in diving, not fit to run a PADI bubblemaker course. And remember that I am myself a dive instructor and previous to this course I had been taught by 6 other technical instructors so I have some experience. The purpose of these courses is to develop skills to a required level. When a student has a problem with a skill you stop and work on that skill till it is mastered. On my course we were doing it by rote. This is lesson 1 we do this, lesson 2 we do this and so on. He did not stop and help me with my weaknesses. For instance I was having problems with valve drills, a skill I have done many times in the past. Instead of working on technique, exercises and tank position he just gave me a bollocking and got on with the next lesson. Yet we had several days in hand. I am sure that a cave instructor who was a good teacher would have got me through the course. Further proof of his inadequacies as a teacher comes from his delight in failing people, in fact I heard him say that if anyone comes for a rebreather cave course with a non standard chassis he always fails them. What he doesn’t realise is that every time he fails someone it is him that has failed as a teacher to get them through the course. He seems to think that failing someone is a measure of how good he is by having standards that other cannot attain.

I must say that I hope that PADI get DSAT right and that they go on to cover cave diving. This is an area that is crying out for good teaching materials, global standards and a proper professional system of instructor training and certification. IANTD, NACD and NSS CDS are well meaning kitchen table organisations that lack the horsepower to run this sport worldwide. GUE is vastly more professional but they are still a relatively small organisation. Cave diving is expanding massively worldwide and would grow more quickly and in a far more professional manner if PADI were involved.

As for me, this whole episode has really soured diving. It no longer carries any joy or delight. Experiencing the Florida caves should have been a special joy, instead it was a week of trauma with an idiot. In the four months since I have been on just 2 dive trips. To Menorca to spend a week, on my own, in the bay at S’Algar with my drysuit and a whole pile of reels. Just to get the whole skills thing out of my system. Then a single dive in Nemo when I went to Brussels. Normally I would have been diving in Menorca several time by now, but I just cannot be bothered. I have no diving trips planned and for the first time in years my main holiday this year is non diving.