It’s All About the Diving

By | Knowledge Base

“It’s just like prostitution!” a good friend said to me a while ago. I was having a conversation with an old friend about the diving industry. We started talking about why we dive. The conversation soon went south.

Have you ever asked yourself why you dive? Many people respond with a variety of answers. Some range from interacting with the aquatic world to the challenge of advanced level diving. All of this is fine, for the casual diver. However, many people really never get why diving is a great activity. There really is only a tiny percentage of divers who feel that the activity of diving has taken on a new meaning in our lives. Diving has given me some of the greatest experiences of my life, next to my family of course. These experiences have given me a larger meaning in my life. That is, I respect the sport of diving and strive to enhance the diving experience for others. That respect has changed how I view the sport, how I teach diving, how I interact with other divers and how I do business with dive stores and others in the industry.

The sad fact is that there are many, many people out there who view the activity of diving as a way to make money only. How do I know this? What data do I have to backup my claim? Well, I worked for a Fortune 500 company. One of my roles was in competitive intelligence. I had access to market research for a wide range of industries, including the scuba industry. I also analyzed the scuba industry for my final project when completing my MBA. So when I say that profits were placed as a top priority of dive industry members, there is significant data to back that up. These people have chosen to sell out to the industry rather than focus on what’s really important. The diving.

There’s nothing wrong with being in the diving business. Businesses, after all, are for profit organizations and should be allowed to make a profit. However, they should be doing it by placing a high emphasis on diving and not on maximizing profits. You see it all the time. Just look on the internet message boards. There are a bunch of dive shops on-line, that as soon as they get a new product in stock, they advertise it on the internet as the greatest thing ever. But they have not clue what the pros/cons are of that particular product. It’s all about sell, sell, sell and getting you to spend your hard earned money. The ironic thing is that 99% of dive store owners THINK they are business people, even though they have no formal training in business practices, and try to act as experts in business matters. If they were such shrewd businessmen, they would realize that they don’t need to maximize profits by increasing their revenues (i.e. sell, sell, sell). As a person who has worked in a variety of roles in a large business, it is funny to watch these people fumble around. I can even predict their next move/mistake because I have seen it in other failing businesses. Take any class in small business and you will learn that over 75% of all small businesses fail after 5 years. By 10 years, that number jumps to 90%. This is primarily due to management shortcomings. Most of the dive stores who have lasted quite a while, have done so mostly by luck and not because they formally designed it that way.

Everything comes down to the dive. Diving has become a part of me, just like my kids. I would never sell out my kids, so why would I sell out diving? Has diving taken a higher meaning in your life? Have you changed how interact with other divers? If you are an instructor, has it changed what you teach and why you teach it? When I was going through my IDC, integrated into the it were ways to sell merchandise, dive travel, and more training. During my instructor course, the course director said that I shouldn’t do anything for free. Granted, people should be paid for their time and knowledge they give. However, some of the greatest experiences I’ve had as a diving instructor was when I was just mentoring a new diver. No class, no money changed hands and I didn’t have to sell out. It was about great discussions and diving experiences. This mentoring has kept them diving and enjoying our sport. If I had charged them for my time, I doubt they would still be diving. It’s not about how much money one makes or doing anything for money. It’s simply about diving.

Do you get why we dive?

Dive Safe,
Duane
Precision Diving

Team Diving vs. Buddy Diving – Do You Know the Difference?

By | Knowledge Base

I recently had a conversation with a potential student about how I teach team diving techniques compared to what is taught in traditional diving classes. It occurred to me that many divers do not know the difference between team diving and buddy diving. They feel that if they stay with their buddy and can air share in an emergency, that is team diving. It is not, team diving is much more than sticking with your buddy and helping out in an emergency.

First, let’s define buddy diving as it is taught in traditional diving classes. When people go through these classes, they are taught to stick with your buddy, do air shares, and some basic buddy rescue skills. While these skills are important, it does not take the place of working as a team. Buddy diving, is simply looking after each other. The buddy is just there. It doesn’t do much for the safety of the team nor the objectives of the dive. One of the biggest areas where buddy diving fails is in the pre-dive planning stage. In traditional PADI diving classes, students are normally taught BWRAF as their pre-dive plan. That is an acronym for: BCD, Weights, Releases, Air, Final OK. There is no discussion as to how they will descend, swim around, communicate, when to thumb the dive and ascend. This is where buddy diving breaks down.

So, what is team diving? Let’s use the analogy of a football team. US football, not soccer that is. In football, the team works together to work their way down the field to score a touchdown. Everyone on the field has a job to do in order to ensure success. If one area of the team fails, then the quarterback gets sacked, the running back fumbles the ball, or the team must punt away the ball. If an offensive lineman does not do his job effectively, then the quarterback or running back can, potentially, get hurt. The same is true for team diving. The team must work together to ensure the safety of all members of the team. Next time you watch a NFL game, watch the offensive linemen. They are always pointing to something, shouting at each other, etc. The quarterback reads the defense and may change the play at the line of scrimmage (i.e. call an audible). This is an excellent demonstration of constant team communication. Each member of the team knows where other teammates are at at all times. Just as in diving, we must be able to effectively communicate to let the team know where we are at, what to look out for, etc. We do this with passive and active light communication.

It all Starts in the Beginning

To ensure team success, the entire team must be on the same page. Not just in knowing what is expected, but in skill and experience level. Inexperienced divers can learn a great deal from experienced divers, but they must learn it at their current experience level before moving on to something more aggressive and out of their level. This is one aspect of diving where people get into trouble. They simply try to do dives, or take classes, that are above what they are really capable of handling. The problem is they don’t know when to put the brakes on their diving and say, I need to get better before moving on. They don’t do a honest assessment of their diving skills. I had to learn this the hard way, see here.

As part of the pre-dive plan, the team must get together and determine how the dive will get done. They must determine what the goal of the dive will be, who will lead, what the gas plan is, etc. For shallow reef dives, this can be very simple and take only a few minutes. For complex decompression dives, it can take days.

The Team that Descends Together, Stays Together

The majority of diving problems occur during the initial descent of the dive. As a team, it is important to stay together during the descent. There are multiple team descent techniques that can be employed, depending on the water conditions. This is where you need to have learned team diving from a good instructor to knows team diving protocols, not reading off the internet. :)

A good number of diving accidents have occurred when diving alone. Now, that doesn’t only mean solo diving. It includes when buddies lose contact and separate from one another. If the team descends together and gets to the target depth, then the leader can communicate to the team the direction to swim. This helps keep the team together and swimming off in the right direction. In other words, everybody starts the dive together.

Lending a Helping Hand, or Two, or Three

When the proverbial crap hits the fan, I want my team members there to help me out. This shouldn’t be confused with being self-sufficient. If I’m having a problem with a gas leak, my teammates can see my valves where I cannot. They can tell me which one to shut down, or just do it for me if I am dealing with another problem. They are there to provide me gas, if for some reason I need it. In other words, my teammates must be on the same page as me so that we can prevent small issues/problems from becoming larger (i.e. the incident pit). When diving as a team, all resources become team resources. This includes equipment, gas, etc. But it also includes that person’s experience. This is where solo diving courses fail because the diver solely relies on their own, possibly limited, experience. When I’m diving with less experienced divers, I’m able to prevent or foresee potential problems they may have based on my past diving experiences. A diver’s education and experience level is a big resource one can bring to the table in the team environment.

The bottom line is that divers shouldn’t be fooled by instructors/dive stores who are claiming to teach team diving. Nine times out of ten, they are only talking about buddy diving and not team diving. Do your homework and ask the all important question, “How?”. An instructor who truly teaches team diving will be able to teach more than just the “buddy system” and teach how the team can achieve it’s goals, including teams with more than 2 or 3 people.

I welcome your questions or comments.

Dive Safe,
Duane Johnson
Precision Diving

Exceeding Agency Standards

By | Training

In the past few months, I have been interested in teaching a couple new classes. So like a good student, I sat down and did my research and found a few instructor trainers. I called one of them up and started asking my questions about the class, how he teaches it, his philosophy, etc. As the conversation started to turn about how he teaches his class, I could tell that my questions were starting to make him uncomfortable. As we were discussing, he says that he routinely exceeds the training standards set by the agency. This was something that he seemed proud of and it piqued my interest. So I asked “How do you exceed standards?”. He kept saying how he has certified X amount of divers at this level, been doing it for X years, etc. So I keep asking how does he exceed the standards. Ultimately, he grew uncomfortable talking about it and eventually changed the subject.

As I pondered this discussion, I started to think about exceeding standards. Now, I’ve always tried to go above and beyond what is written in the course outlines. I consider myself a diving instructor that does exceed standards. So I asked myself that same question, “How do I exceed standards?”. So this article is about how a student can evaluate if their prospective instructor(s) exceed standards.

1) Get a copy of the course standards. In order to know what the minimums you will be doing for the class, you need to know what the agency requires it’s instructors to teach. You can then use this to compare what the perspective instructor will be teaching you. I put all current outlines for the TDI courses that I teach on my web site Precision Diving Forms. If you would like course outlines for classes not listed, you can contact me and I will send them to you.

2) Find out how often the perspective instructor makes modifications to his/her class. Just because someone has a lot of teaching experience doesn’t make them an effective instructor if they are not continually reviewing how they teach their courses and not trying to improve how they teach over the years. Ask to see a revision history for any slides, extra material, etc the instructor has created. Everytime I make a change to a course outline, slide(s), or skills on a dive I keep a running history to show how my course(s) evolved. Training agencies will tweak their course outlines, but an instructor who is striving to exceed training standards will do a post-class evaluation on how well they presented the material, course content, evaluation procedures, etc on every class they teach. They first thing I do after I teach a class is process the certification, assuming it was earned. Then I write up notes on how well the class went, my self-evaluation of my performance, etc. If I have a class that spans multiple days, I will do this at the end of each day. It is important for me to document everything that went on in my class so I can learn from it for the next class.

3) Ask why kind of training your perspective instructor has had in the area you are pursuing. Many training agencies allow instructors to simply apply to teach a specialty course. There are many instructors out there who have never done the dives in a specific area, but are able to teach it. For example, if you are looking for a dry suit class, you wouldn’t want an instructor who most dives in a wet suit. If you are looking for a tech instructor, you wouldn’t want someone who is diving single tank rigs most of the time. These are just some simple examples, but you get the point. Find out your perspective instructors experience in the course you are wanting to take. Do everything in you power to find out this information, many instructors may not be 100% honest with their diving experience.

4) Find instructors who are professional educators. Many instructors are not full-time instructors. Not even the ones who own dive stores. They have to divide their time between a day job (working in an office or running the dive store) and teaching. When an instructor cannot give 100% of their work time, then their courses will reflect that. If we look at dive store owners, they are extremely busy people. They have to manage the store in addition to running classes. This is related to #2 above. If someone doesn’t have much time to spend reviewing their classes, they can’t continually improve them and will teach the same thing over and over. When I am not teaching diving, I am diving. When I am not diving, I teach business and computer classes at a local college. Educating people is what I do. So I am continually searching for new ways to educate my students (diving and college). By spending quite a bit of time on this, I can focus my non-teaching time on how to be a better instructor.

5) Passion. Anybody who is seeking out continuing dive education is passionate about the sport. Instructors need to be equally passionate. Gauging an instructors passion for diving is very difficult. Some say that if an instructor is continuing their diving education, they are passionate about the sport. Others say if they are diving a lot, they are passionate. Both can be true, but determining the motives behind those two is where the tricky part comes in. If an instructor is always taking instructor level courses, then they may only be motivated by money from teaching this new class. If they are diving a lot, they may only be diving while teaching classes. Find out where the perspective instructor is diving. If an instructor is passionate about diving, he or she will dive almost anywhere and at anytime. In my area, we have this wonderful little quarry, (Haigh Quarry). It is used mostly for dive training, but it is a fun place to dive as well. Many people refuse to do many fun dives at the quarry. They feel there is not much to see, it’s boring, etc. I love diving every chance I get. Even though I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours underwater at our quarry, it never gets old for me. I enjoy going there because I enjoy the activity of diving. For me, there is no bad dive site. Just varying degrees of good.

6) Check the references and the references of the references. Confused? Don’t be. Firstly, you should ask the perspective instructor for a list of references. This list shouldn’t be their best friends. It should be a list of people who can articulate the good and bad about the instructor. As a perspective student, you should be an informed consumer. You should know the best qualities of your perspective instructor as well as their short comings. Be wary of references who only rave about an instructor as they may not be fully educated/informed. If needed, find people that know that reference and ask about them. Regardless of what you choose to do, take references with a grain of salt.

All of these combined will give you an indication if your perspective instructor actually goes above and beyond minimum standards. It is easy for an instructor to add a dive or two and call that exceeding standards. But if there is no content or education behind those extra dives, it isn’t really exceeding standards in the true spirit. Keep in mind, in most dive classes, you will most likely do an extra dive or two anyway. Diving is meant to be fun and so should the classes. So make sure you are getting top level education and have as much fun along the way.

Dive Safe,
Duane
Precision Diving