Diver burnout is the number one cause of divers who stop diving. I’ve always been curious if the DEMA’s and PADI’s of the scuba diving world have done much research in this topic. When you are at the instructor level, you see it quite a bit. There are your favorite students diving all the time one year, then the next year they are off doing something other than diving. It’s frustrating I know. Let’s look at some of the reasons why scuba divers do burnout from the sport. [Read more...]

I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. The information presented in this article should be discussed with medical professionals before engaging in scuba diving activities. I want to discuss something that is near and dear to my heart. That is scuba diving with diabetes. So I want to come clean with everyone and confess, I am a diabetic. I’ve been a diabetic for the past 13 years (I became one in my 20′s). Those closest to me know about my condition. I don’t talk about it much, until now. [Read more...]

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. I had just started teaching day 2 of an Intro to Tech class. After a little bit of dry runs and debriefing, I decided to check my phone for messages before getting geared up and jumping in the water. There were four calls from my wife. My wife rarely calls me once, let alone four times, so something must be wrong. When I called her she informed me that my grandmother had just passed away that morning. My grandmother was very close to me and I took the news rather hard. Since I had already started the class, I just couldn’t stop at the mid-way point. Considering that my grandmother lived in Oklahoma, there was little I could do that day anyway. I decided to continue class. I knew that I could still deliver a safe class, despite having a heavy heart, because of a technique called compartmentalization. [Read more...]

I was recently contracted to evaluate a dive store’s web site for possible improvements. As I was checking out all of their course descriptions something really stood out to me. They were offering every single recreational course and a bunch of technical diving courses. Now this isn’t anything new, but when I looked at their instructor bios page, none of the instructors were able to teach their technical diving classes. When I asked the owner why they are offering classes for which they don’t have any instructors on staff, he told me that he has a tech instructor in another state that does their tech courses. It got me thinking about more outsourcing scuba diving classes. [Read more...]