Certification Cards: Sport Diving's Aid to Picking Up Girls

Hey girl, wanna get wet?

Snorkelling is for big girls and sissies. Real men; tough, grab-life-by-the-balls men go SCUBA diving. SCUBA, after all, has loads of equipment. Stuff like valves and regulators and cylinder thingies. You know, the real technical stuff that only tough, black-clad hero types can possibly understand. And of course, you need training; tough, stamina-stretching, mind-challenging training. The sort of training that needs to be delivered by tough, hard trainers who, in another life, would have been NASA pilots or special forces soldiers had they not had flat feet, weren’t scared of the dark and didn't have to take care of their dad's photocopying business. And, once you completed this training for heroes you get certified!

Anyone can snorkel, but only real tough guys are bona fide divers with a plastic laminated id cards to prove it. Right? The idea that being a certified recreational diver makes you some kind of underwater James Bond is, and always has been, complete nonsense. Yet, amongst some sports diving enthusiasts and lets face it, a lot of instructors, the belief still persists. We’ve all met the pub bore whose list of career experiences exceeds the years they’ve actually been alive and they are properly found in all recreational sports but for some reason they seem particularly drawn to the world of SCUBA diving. One reason for this, in our opinion, is the sheer number of “professional diving” courses you can take and subsequently all those lovely laminated cards you can collect. But is the world of badge collecting SCUBA tough guys under threat? For a few years now the world of recreational diving has been dramatically changing, so much so that SCUBA diving has become… well passé. You see nowadays, real adventurous men with their beautiful, adventurous and tough bikini-clad girlfriends now go freediving, which is diving without all the faff – no tanks, no tubes, no regulators, etc. etc.

Imagine how galling it must be for tough guy Brad, to flash his laminated boat diver card like an FBI agent at the sexy blonde sitting at the bar, only to have her raise a perfectly manicured eyebrow and whisper “oh darling, I only date men who can hold their breath for ten minutes" then wink suggestively. All that pool training, all that money spent on buoyancy control devices and plastic laminated cards that certify you as a shore diver, underwater photographer and advanced bubble blower and you can’t even use them to pick up girls anymore. Now before SCUBA fraternities around the world get all hot and bothered and threaten to whip us with their hoses think about it for a minute. Apart from getting an extra luggage allowance from the airline why would you need these ID’s if it’s not to impress girls at bars? Who has ever been stopped by the beach police and asked to prove they’re licenced to use the SCUBA tanks they’re putting on or that they’ve undergone a course of instruction on reading a dive computer? The answer is no one. Ever! More of this later, but let’s get back to those tough guy sports divers getting frustrated at having freedivers stomping all over their macho turf. How are they going to get laid now? Well, if you can’t beat them, join ‘em. The beautiful world of freediving could be yours Brad, you just need err…. some training.

That though is the problem. Who exactly do you go to to get that training? After all there aren’t that many expert freedivers in the world, mainly due to the fact that the majority of the worlds best freedivers tend to kill or maim themselves by… Well freediving.

But that problem seems to have been swept aside, because now, the same people who can teach to you to fall off a boat with style or waddle into the sea from shore or even take a professional underwater holiday snap can now teach you to freedive. Yep the SCUBA diving organisations of the world have spotted the changing trend in recreational diving that threatens to stop bubble blowers picking up girls at bars and are surfing to the rescue.

If there is a something you want to do underwater, the diving organisations probably have a course for it. Which brings us back to the these courses, the ID cards that come with them and the question of how?

Are you certified to do that?

How can there be instructors out there who are qualified to teach SCUBA, photography, videography, cave diving, tech diving, underwater sculpture, deep-sea mountaineering and now freediving as well? All right we made two of those up. But we think you get the point.

Now, if any of you have heard of Malcolm Gladwell, you will know of his 10000-hour theory. Simply put, you need to have carried out 10000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert. Assuming you did nothing else but practice for eight hours a day, every day, it would still take you almost three and half years to become an expert at something. Something like… Say.... Open water diving. And, assuming you want to be taught by an expert and not some nineteen year-old surfer dude on a gap year, that means the person who’s teaching you to dive from a boat should have many, many years of boat diving experience. If they also taught freediving, underwater photography, tech diving and cave diving as well then they would have spent around seventeen and half years practicing themselves and that’s before they have learnt to teach. All in all, if such an expert instructor existed, and they don’t, then they would have spent the best part of two decades of careful practice before they even met their first student. Possible from a time point of view maybe, but hardly from a financial one. After all, no one moves to Bali to become a diving instructor because they are a raging success in their own country.

Gladwell’s theory does, we agree, tend to fall down a bit since there is such a thing as skill transference and aggregation of experiential learning and it recent times it has come in for some heavy criticism. But it does point at a clear problem in the world of recreational diver training which is that most of it is utter garbage. In fact it is the training organisations themselves that seem to be fueling the Walter Mitty mentality that permeates the sport.

The problem is one of regulation. You cannot get a licence to drive a car without undergoing an independent test and nor can you fly a plane or even parachute out of it without undergoing an examination of your skill by an external assessor. And you can’t be a special forces soldier without undergoing rigorous assessment of your physical and mental capabilities. Yes you can buy the badge and pretend you are one but you’re not and never will be because it’s tough, very tough and the forces weed out those who are not up to standard. Wanting to just use the badge to pick up girls is unlikely to be enough motivation to get you through that sort of course.

In the world of sport diving no such standard exists. The same people who train you are the same people who certify you and in such a self-regulating world the idea that the person who takes your hard earned bucks to train you to dive is at the end of the course going to say “sorry mate, you're crap at this” and refuse to certify you is just ludicrous.

The training organisations are in it for the money and telling their students that the training they’ve just spent their money on has led to nothing is a quick way of going bust or getting sued. Of course if such a standard did exist, if each nation had a law that said an externally assessed sport diving certification was a legal requirement for diving in their jurisdiction then the same organisations would probably get sued to destruction anyway. Would this be a bad thing? We don’t thing so. In such a world, the number and types of course would fall dramatically, training would be globally recognised, organisations would be legally accountable and instructors would be externally assessed yearly to ensure that they really were experts and not just selling cards that you can use to  pick up girls at bars.

I think we're gonna be sick!

This of course will never happen anytime soon since the training organisations would fight tooth and nail to stop their business model going belly up overnight. But maybe one day it will. But for now tough guy SCUBA divers will be able to train to dive without tanks and sexy blondes will still have laminated cards flashed in their faces and endure long lectures at the bar about breath hold techniques ad nauseam.

For the rest of us though, we will still know that most freedivers never underwent any formal training, never paid to get a laminated piece of card and never ever had anyone train them to fall off a boat. We will know that far from being for sissies, snorkelling is still the best route into recreational freediving and spearfishing and it always has been. Remember skin diving anyone? And, we will know that SCUBA diving is full of phony expensive courses, taught by trainers who aren’t experts, designed so that Walter Mitty types have a chance at getting laid.

And for those sexy girls in bars we offer this piece of advice. If you ever meet someone who shows you a freediving certification card, prepare for a long and boring evening of tough guy talk or make your excuses and go find some snorkellers. We don’t have cards that certify we can hold our breath but we do know what to do with a snorkel.

Here’s some links to diver ready. A pretty good YouTube channel where the host outlines some of the utter nonsense that infests the sport diving world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0s-qPErecA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWTmwasCCUY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH43G4HE3VA

And here is one of our other posts about freediving courses.

https://snorkelclub.blogspot.com/2015/11/badges-we-dont-need-no-stinking-badges.html

The Great Snorkelling Myths Debunked

 

Oh crap, I forget the tube thing

You don't need to be able to swim to go snorkelling!

Many snorkelling safari companies and tours claim that anyone can go snorkelling and that being able to swim is a benefit and not a necessity. Yeah right...! The only way that such a claim could ever be true is if you plan to snorkel in the bath. The truth is that if you cannot swim you cannot snorkel. The ocean is potentially a very dangerous place and heading into its embrace without the most basic skill of swimming is simply asking for trouble. So don't believe the snorkelling company idiots that tell you otherwise, they're setting you up to drown. Wanna snorkel? Then learn to swim!

You don't need to be fit to go snorkelling!

No one is suggesting that you have to be an Olympic athlete to go snorkelling. That said though, if you cannot walk up a flight of stairs without breaking out in a heavy sweat and wheezing like an asthmatic hippo, then it would be fair to say that snorkelling is not really for you. Snorkelling - at least the more exciting, energetic variety rather than the easybreath full-face mask wearing bobbing about stuff - takes effort. Your breathing will be limited by the snorkel, you will use muscles that you didn't realise you had and your body will have to deal with cold water, currents and waves. It's worth noting that the majority of people who drown while snorkelling have two things in common, they can't swim very well and they are unfit. So if you have to pop several pills before meals, need an inhaler to help you breath and start sweating like a sumo wrestler in a sauna when reaching for the TV remote control then you'd best think very carefully about donning the old mask and flippers and diving into the big blue. Wanna snorkel? Learn to swim and work on your fitness.

You only need a cheap mask and some flappy-paddle things for your feet to go snorkelling!

Snorkelling is in fact snorkel diving or skin diving and differs from SCUBA diving in many ways, not least in the fact that you don't need several burly men to carry all your equipment around but don't think that all you need to enjoy a snorkelling adventure is a cheap bright green mask and a pair of rubber swim fins from the nearest tourist shop. Cheap means cheap it doesn't mean good. In fact cheap means crap... If you buy crap stuff you'll have a crap experience. This doesn't mean you have to spend a fortune, just invest wisely. A decent mask can cost as little as £30, a decent snorkel no more than £20 and a decent pair of fins around £30-40. Chuck in a rash vest and wetsuit for good measure and you'll probably spend no more than £200. OK, that can seem a lot but think of it this way. A cheap snorkelling set will probably set you back £30 and will probably fall apart in a week. This means that you'll probably have to buy a new set every year. A decent set of gear will probably last you ten years, perhaps even a lifetime if you look after them. So in the long run it will work out cheaper and you will of course have a much better experience. Wanna snorkel? Learn to swim, work on your fitness and invest in some decent equipment.

Less is sometimes more

You don't need anyone else with you to go snorkelling!

Ah yes, the great “I can do this all by myself” myth. There is of course nothing to stop you snorkelling alone apart from the fact it is idiotic. Let's think about this for a second. Do you know any sport, activity or past time that is more enjoyable to do solo. If you do, you probably need to get some friends and very probably a girlfriend! Going snorkelling alone is not only less enjoyable it is foolhardy. If you get into trouble who's going to help? Who's going to raise the alarm? In fact who knows where you are and what you are doing? Wanna snorkel? Then learn to swim, work on your fitness, invest in some decent gear and never, ever snorkel alone.

Snorkelling can only be done in hot climates and warm seas!

It's true to say that snorkelling is a lot easier when the sun is shining, the water is warm and the pristine white sand beach is littered with beautiful people wearing very little. However, just because it's cold, the sea is a bit rough and those beautiful people are a bit blubbery around the middle and you wish they'd put their bloody clothes back on, doesn’t mean you can't snorkel. After all it's not the stuff above the surface that should be interesting you anyway, it's the stuff beneath the water. So ignore all the twaddle about snorkelling being a tropical island sport and get adventurous. Iceland, Scotland, Ireland, England, Northern France and a great many other colder climes offer some superb snorkelling. Of course you are going to need to wear a bit more than a pair of speedos if you're planning on diving beneath these waters, but don't let that put you off, a decent cold water wetsuit isn't that expensive and you could even invest in a drysuit. Trust us on this, coral reefs and shoals of brightly coloured fish are great but cold water kelp forests and rocky shores can be just as interesting so don't always follow the crowd. Be different and dip you toes, so to speak, in the less snorkelled locales. Wanna snorkel? Then learn to swim, work on your fitness, invest in some decent gear, never snorkel alone and be adventurous in your choice of destination.
 

Eric and his friends found the local marine life very interesting

Snorkelling is just for children and old people!

If you believe this then your name is probably Brad. You no doubt have a PADI instructor's certification card in your pocket, wear t-shirts emblazoned with military logos and bore everyone rigid with your belief that you would have been a Colonel in the Green Berets by now if it hadn't been for your congenitally flat-feet and saggy man breasts. Thinking that snorkelling is some sort of “sissy” younger brother of diving says more about the thinker than it says about the thought. It's as ludicrous as thinking that women can't be diving instructors, men can't be nurses or that the Ama divers just do it to show off their breasts. Snorkelling can be sedate. It can be exhilarating. But it never has been and never will be the “sissy” brother of anything. It is a sport that is accessible, requiring only a modest investment in equipment and can open up the wonders of the marine world to young and old alike. But like everything it is not for everyone. If you can't swim, can't handle breathing through a tube, are scared of water touching your face or have an unswerving belief that men should wear camouflage clothing festooned with lots and lots of badges at all times, then snorkelling really isn't for you. If however you can swim, are reasonably fit, aren't afraid of getting your face wet and are not a gold-plated twat called Brad then don't belief all the myths and dive in. You won't regret it. 

She's tougher than you Brad and she's supposed to have breasts

 

Sport Diving Needs A Hero: It Ain't You Brad

In the editors letter in the March edition of Sport Diver (the official publication of the PADI diving association in the UK), the editor, Mark Evans, reflects on the sad death of the “First Lady of Diving” Lotte Haas in January of this year and asks: where are all the new diving heroes? 

Mark Evans writes: Lotte, together with her husband Hans, pioneered scuba diving adventures on the silver screen in the 1950’s and along with charismatic Frenchman Jacques-Yves Cousteau, were responsible for getting entire generations actively involved in our sport by bringing a whole new world to an excited audience. Mark goes on to say: We desperately need modern day heroes’ of this calibre to bring the underwater world to the masses.  

Mark highlights that there are the likes of Steve Backshall, Miranda Krestovnikoff and Monty halls (and before you ask, we don’t know either), who are all doing their bit to raise the profile of diving through more-mainstream channels, but the likes of Lotte, Hans and Cousteau were mega-stars of their time whose appeal spanned the globe and captured the attention of young and old alike.

Mark then makes a final appeal: going forward, we also need Hollywood to splash diving all the cinemas again, but in a positive, engaging and exciting fashion – no more Open Water rubbish thank you!

Mark’s lament, first got us raising our glasses in a last tribute to the late, great and gorgeous Lotte Haas and then putting them down again as we ruminated on his words. Is he right? Does diving lack modern heroes? And if so, why?

Lotte Haas

Our first thought was, that to a degree, Mark has answered his own question. Lotte, Hans, Jacques-Yves Cousteau et al, were exactly what he said they were: pioneers. They broke new ground, they invented and then developed their own equipment, they often risked their lives and like others of their ilk (Ron and Valerie Taylor anyone?) they brought the diving world to a whole new audience. They were definitely heroes, but more to the point they were heroes of their time. In the fifties and sixties the ability to travel to exotic locations and then plunge into the azure ocean in search of adventure were limited to a wealthy few. Back in the 1950’s, World War Two was still a deep, dark scar on the world. In Britain for example, a holiday adventure in 1950 was little more than a camping trip to a damp field in Cornwall or a dreary weekend in a rainy seaside town – grandparents included. Diving back then was something few people outside of the Navy had ever even heard of and even if they had, we bet they had very little money to squander on unproven diving equipment and, as often as not, unproven airlines. The underwater adventures of Lotte Haas were therefore pure escapism, something that captured your imagination in the local cinema rather than something you got involved with on your local beach. Nowadays of course, anyone with a passport and a few pounds in their pocket can pop on a plane and in less than a working day be walking barefoot on an idyllic sandy beach. The escapist world of Lotte and Hans is no longer something that you can only dream about on a wet night in Scunthorpe, but something you can actually do yourself. The world of diving is now, more than ever, open to far more than any of the early pioneers could have imagined. Perhaps, though, that is part of the problem. If every paradise isle is jammed packed with divers, all doing exactly the same thing, with exactly the same GoPro camera, where is the originality? To be a pioneer you have to do something that someone else hasn’t done before.

Then we thought about Mark’s plea to Hollywood: We also need Hollywood to splash diving all over the cinemas again, but in a positive, engaging and exciting fashion.

So Mark wants Hollywood to make a film all about diving, but not one that shows any of the inherent dangers of going into an environment that evolution has singularly made you unsuitable for. Instead he wants Hollywood to make a film that is inspiring, engaging, exciting and well, just bloody jaw-dropping tremendous, that even the most aqua-phobic among us will dive head first into the sea at the first opportunity. No sharks though, we can’t stress that too much, there must definitely be no sharks, and absolutely no moray eels hiding in crevices. So no remakes of Jaws, The Deep, Open Water, Deep Blue Sea, or any of these films that Diver Magazine (the North American Publication) calls the best diving movies of all time.

Mark, it seems, has a very different opinion about what makes a film engaging or exciting from the rest of us and we suspect doesn’t understand that Hollywood makes films in order to make money, not to support the diving industry but that aside, there is a fundamental problem with such an appeal – it requires someone else to do something! That’s not particularly pioneering Mark!

The old version of GoPro lacked portability

Can you imagine Lotte and Hans or Jacques or Valerie or Ron or even Monty Halls (and no we still don’t know who he is) sitting around and wondering when someone else is going to film all the stuff they were doing? No of course you can’t, pioneers don’t wait for other people to do things they get on with it, that’s what being a pioneer is all about and a quick perusal of the list in the Women Divers Hall of Fame, shows that there seems to be a great deal of women doing exactly that.

So what’s going on here? Diving has had it’s pioneers, it has had it’s movies so why does Mark Evans think that the it still needs someone of high calibre to bring the sport to a whole new audience? Then we thought about our own early diving experiences and why we prefer snorkelling and we had an answer. It’s all down to Brad.

You see our sport has many advantages over diving. You don’t need a lot of expensive equipment. You don’t need to join PADI or BSAC. You don’t need to know how to correctly spell Cousteau and more importantly, and this is the crux of the matter, you don’t have to spend time with Brad. 

The diving world is full of Brads; you meet them in every dive shop, every dive operation and dive club around the world. Brad of course comes in different shapes and sizes but the Brad species all have one thing in common – he has an unbelievably over-inflated opinion of himself. You would think that you might be able to avoid an encounter with Brad but you would be wrong. The diving world it seems, insists that anyone’s first foray into the sport must begin with a meeting with Brad. Yep, Brad is your diving instructor and he is adamant that he is going to make you look a complete berk while he teaches you the basics of diving in a hotel swimming pool. Of course Brad doesn’t normally teach people to dive, as he will explain ad nauseam. Brad’s real job (the one he’s taking a break from in order to train you hapless tourists ‘not to kill yourself out there’ in the deep blue) is a fighter pilot or a Navy commando or mine clearance expert or, and this is becoming more prevalent in Braddy world, a Green peace defender of the earth. Yep Brad is taking a year off from all the stress of being a Top Gun, storming beaches, disarming mines with toothpicks and smuggling whales out of Japan in his board shorts, just to make sure you know the difference between a fin and a flipper. Flipper is a dolphin according to Brad. According to the rest of the world, Flipper is a fictional character in a TV series portrayed by a variety of Cetaceans’ or those things that you put on your feet that helps propel you through the water. Brad is the antithesis of all that Mark Evans wants. Far from being engaging, charismatic, exciting and likeable; Brad is annoying, obnoxious and soooooo boring that most people who encounter him and his egocentric ilk are deterred from ever getting involved in diving again. So Mark Evans is wrong when he laments the lack of modern diving heroes. You see, the real legacy of Lotte Haas and the legends of her time is that diving no longer needs a modern hero or a Hollywood blockbuster to bring the sport to the masses – that’s already been done! What the sport of diving needs is to stop Brad and his gormless, mind-numbingly dull brethren ruining that legacy for millions.

An afterthought. Several beers later, we suddenly realised that there are no real snorkelling heroes – apart from The Dangerous Snorkelling Club of course. Then we found this picture of Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson. He may be fat, have bad teeth and be offensive to Argentinians and Mexicans but we’d rather have a beer with him than Brad. Cheers Jezza and very a big cheers to you Lotte – the underwater world, has indeed, lost a heroine.

 

Who are you looking at Brad?