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

Goodbyeeeeee. Sport Diver UK Chucks The Wetsuit Into The Corner And Heads Off Into The Sunset.

If you have not already heard… Then Brace yourself, for we bring you shocking news. Sport Diver UK magazine; the official PADI journal for Europe and the Middle East, a stalwart of the diving media for decades, is to cease publication. The final edition is already on the shelves. No doubt, like us, you are stunned at this news and are currently starring wide-eyed at the computer screen, mouth agape, perhaps with a stream of dribble running down your chin and dripping messily onto your keyboard. We know, we know. A world without Sport Diver UK! A world without the musings of Mark Evans, Will Harrison, Paul Rose or Martin Edge, how will you survive? Who will explain to you that the Red Sea has the best diving in the world or that Thailand has the best diving in the world or that the Bahamas has the best diving in the world or that Mauritius has the best diving in the world? Where will you get all your medical advice from, now that the Dive Doctor has packed up his stethoscope and gone into private practice? How will you know what to wear without Scubalab telling you which wetsuit is pre-eminent and which baseball cap is de rigueur this season? And, how will we all find out what new and inexpensive diving course the PADI organisation has developed to expand all the world’s diving knowledge and, more importantly, its dive badge collection without this glossy-paged magazine.

Okay. None of you are thinking this are you? You’ve probably never even heard of Mark Evans or his cohorts. And, even if you did, you didn’t really care. You get your medical advice from your own doctor rather than a column in a monthly magazine after all. You don’t care that the best diving in the world could be found in the exact same place that Sport Diver happened to be visiting that month and no doubt think that Scubalab is Aquaman’s secret hideout rather than an equipment-testing column. News of the sudden demise of the magazine that Mark Evans spent eighteen years of his life editing will probably elicit nothing more amongst the bubble-blowing masses than a gentle raised eyebrow or the shrug of an uncaring shoulder. Which may explain why the magazine has hit the rocks in the first place. 

Now, as far as we are aware the owners of Sport Diver UK, Bonnier International Media (who only bought the title back in 2013), have not been forthcoming in their reasons for ending the magazines existence. Even in his final editors letter, Mark Evans, doesn’t really explain the underlying rational behind the decision to cease publication of what he himself calls a “major player in the marketplace”. And yet, in that final letter, the reasons become all to clear.

For starters, as we’ve rather heavily hinted at, the vast majority of you water junkies and bubble-blowers out there didn’t give a rats hairy bottom about Sport Diver and we suspect you had good reason for this. A quick trek through the online diving forums and you get a feeling for why the magazine ran out of air.

Here are a few snippets from those forums:

You see gear reviews on gear that is either mediocre or overpriced. You also see things like "top 10 wetsuits" where the really good wetsuits aren't even listed. I think it's mostly just advertising. 

Even with reviews, you'll notice, you won't find anything negative about anything. Print editorial is too afraid to piss off a manufacturer who may pull advertisement funds. Though, it is also relevant for online publishing. Scuba is such a small niche that there are only a handful of manufacturers with deep pockets. You don't want to tell potential customers to stay away from some of their products; it is not what companies pay for. Thus, you get all kinds of review articles that are so bland, feel like whatever you buy, you won't go wrong. There is simply no critique anymore other than on forums by private entities.

I'm just surprised people haven't got how much they are being conned into paying for a catalogue every month. Some of the articles are so obviously just filler.

I stopped reading it regularly when the percentage of content about overseas diving went over 90%. I know there's not a massive amount to be written about UK diving, but not everyone can afford to travel overseas for dive trips all the time.

I was a subscriber but constantly wondered why. It was just an excuse for free jollys for the editor and assistant. Content was poor, and was miles behind Diver Magazine in every department. A new editor who actually gave a monkeys about turning out a decent read may have worked wonders.

Well, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the general consensus was that Sport Diver UK was getting things badly wrong. They focused on pleasing advertisers rather than readers. Features became irrelevant fillers, equipment tests became bland and uncritical whilst more and more pages were turned over to advertisements. The result was the readership turned off and without readers; advertisers had no one to sell to. Rather ironic isn’t it that the desire to make money from advertisers rather than from sales of the magazine would deliver the deathblow.  We could of course be wrong; Sport Diver might just have a great respect for its readers, but before you decide that let’s go back to that final letter from the Editor, Mark Evans, entitled “So long and thanks for all the fish”.

Now we don’t know about anyone else but what we took away from that letter was that Mark’s and Sport Diver UK’s greatest achievement as a whole was holding a party for all the “movers and shakers” in the diving industry. A party that was so good it became an annual occurrence and in the last two years became a “lavish event” for a select few hundred with musical entertainment and the “showmanship of Monty Halls and Andy Torbet”. Err… Wow. Looks like Mark and friends really have a lot of fish to miss.

Anyone who’s a fan of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy books (as Mark Evans clearly is) will no doubt know that the Hitchhikers Guide was an electronic travel guide originally published by Megadodo publications. Megadodo was an organisation that regularly relocated its editorial offices for reasons of climate, local hostility or tax concerns, had little time for it’s readership and finally lost all credibility with said readership when it relocated to a resort planet. Maybe that’s what Mark and the other members of the Sport Diving team thought they were: Megadodo employees. Maybe it really was just one long party of diving, cocktail sipping and going to industry parties with the occasional chore of writing something down and publishing it now and again. If so, then the gravy train has finally hit the buffers and Mark and his cohorts will have to sober up and seek alternative employment but who can blame them for having a party for as long as they did? Apart, maybe, from all those Sport Diver subscribers, who are probably not going to be all that impressed with the “it’s been a blast for us” message. If, on the other hand, Mark and his team (and there have been a lot over the years) truly were interested in delivering a quality media product to the diving fraternity then sadly they have failed and that failure should be a lesson to all others who are thinking on embarking on such a business model. Yes you can make money from advertising but for god sake, make sure you have a readership to advertise to!

So Sport Diver UK wasn’t very good and has paid the price for its mediocrity but why, you may be asking, are we so bothered about its demise? Well for one thing, it’s a PADI publication. Which means it has had us in fits of laughter over the years (although probably not intended) and we will miss the giggles. For another it has given us endless material to poke fun at, from editorials that contradict themselves and the “you’ll love this new piece of equipment” reviews to the endless recycled features about Egypt, Thailand and Mauritius et al. But there is another reason. Sport Diver has been around for years in one guise or another and like a lot of things that have been around for so long it becomes familiar, it becomes comfortable. Sport Diver was like the old regular in the local bar. The one who sits in the same spot and always seems to be there mumbling to himself. Yes, he bores you to death with his endless anecdotes, often talks nonsense and never ever turns down a drink but without him the bar seems oddly different, less recognisable. Despite its many, many flaws, we’ll miss Sport Diver UK, we really will.

On the upside though there is still Diver Magazine. In March’s edition, a guy called Steve Warren argues that when PADI entered the UK it was more professional than BSAC, particularly when it came to charging fees for training. Steve goes on to say that the drive for cheaper training and the subsequent failure to charge high fees is endangering the quality of training and destroying the livelihoods of trainers; although he then argues that PADI are the biggest culprit for doing this. It’s an interesting piece and has provoked some long guffaws over the beer. So goodbye Sport Diver UK and thanks for all the laughs. Hello Diver Magazine, we look forward to all the laughs to come.

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Update 6th March 2017

Just as we were lamenting the demise of Sport Diver UK along with Mark Evans and his crew, it appears that our laments are premature. Sport Diver UK has morphed into Scuba Diver Magazine. Now we don't know how much the magazine will cost but the website promises unbiased reviews, which will be a change. Another break with the past is that the magazine will not be affiliated to any single training organisation but will cover them all - which sounds good. The website states: 

scubadivermag.com is the ultimate online destination whether you are a scuba diver, technical diver or freediver. Whatever agency you trained with, and whatever your level of experience, you will find plenty to enrich and expand your diving horizons.

Which does beg a question. If the website is free to access, why would you buy the magazine?  Still, it's nice to know that Mark's partying days aren't over just yet.... Cheers Mark

Charter Boats, Diving Deaths And The Shaming Of The Diving Industry

In 1998 Tom and Eileen Lonergan went for a dive on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. They never returned. The crew of the dive boat they were on simply forgot about them, leaving them alone and lost in the vast ocean. It took two days before anyone even reported them missing and by the time the search was conducted nothing was found apart from a torn piece of Eileen's rash vest. It is believed they either drowned or were eaten by sharks. You may have read about the incident or if you didn't, you may have seen the film Open Water that was based on the whole tragic affair. Following this incident new rules were introduced to ensure that dive charters carried out accurate head counts, if 10 divers go in the water then 10 divers better come out of the water. Not exactly rocket science is it. Alas it seems, the art of counting is a skill that still evades Instructors and Dive Masters (and we use that term really loosely) around the world.

Sundiver Express

For instance in 2004, a year after the release of the film, the dive charter boat Sundiver Express left a diver behind following a dive off Newport Beach, California. The Sundiver was carrying a group of 20 divers and was staged near the oil rig Eureka. The diver in question Dan Carlock, experienced difficulty equalising, and was suffering from ear pain when he surfaced about 120 metres from the dive boat. Though he attempted to swim back to the boat, his legs cramped, so he waved a yellow safety buoy and blew his whistle. No one on the vessel noticed. A Dive Master working for Venice-based Ocean Adventures marked Dan Carlock present on the dive roster, even though he was absent when the remainder of the divers returned. As strong currents were picking up, the crew decided to move to a second dive site about seven miles away. When the divers left the boat for their second dive, Carlock was once again marked on the roster, even though he was on his own, several miles away from the boat. Three hours after leaving Carlock behind, the crew finally realised he was missing. The Sundiver’s Captain called the Coast Guard to the second dive site – miles from Carlock’s actual position.

 

The Coast Guard never found Daniel. Instead, he was spotted by a fifteen-year-old boy scout on board a tallship called the Argus. The ship was taking the scouts on an excursion and had veered off course to avoid a freighter. If not for the ship’s change in direction, it's possible that Carlock would never have been found alive. We suspect that Dan has been an ardent supporter of the boy scout movement ever since.

 

6 Years after the incident, Dan Carlock was awarded $1.68 Million in compensation for post traumatic stress and the fact that he developed skin cancer as a result of the sunburn he sustained while adrift. The court originally awarded $2 Million, but this was reduced as the judge considered that Carlock was partially to blame for surfacing so far from the ship. A decision that we and I suspect a great many will consider to be a harsh judgement at best and at worst, sheer bloody lunacy. Carlock was already in distress, and was surfacing due to that distress. It would be understandable then, that his orientation might have been affected. Somewhat different we might add, from failing to hear a whistle, failing to notice a diver waving a big yellow sausage around and marking a missing man as present, not once, but twice – some Judges eh!

Still you'd imagine that the Sundiver Express team would have learnt their lesson – never again would that happen! Err... Wrong. On 29^th December 2015 the Charter left another diver behind. That morning, Laurel Silver-Valker, went diving for lobsters off the coast of Catalina Island with Sundiver Express. The boat left the dive site without realising Silver-Valker wasn’t on board. The boat returned to search for Silver-Valker, but was unable to find her and notified the Coast Guard. She has never been found. Press coverage of the incident has suggested that although a competent and experienced diver, Silver-Valker was not diving with a buddy at the time and that as she had previously worked dive-boats to fund her diving, it is unclear in what capacity she was aboard and may not have been on the diver roster. Whatever answers, to how and why Silver-Valker was left behind, might come to light during the investigation, the fact that this is not the first time that the Sundiver has been involved in such a tragedy means the whole experience is likely to be a very painful and costly one for all involved. Not least because Sundiver Express should not have been trading in the first place. According to the Orange County Register the tour company Sundiver International Inc. of Long Beach has unfiled tax returns and $3,991 in unpaid taxes, according to the Franchise Tax Board. Records show the tax board suspended Sundiver International on Feb. 1, 2012.

“When a company is suspended, they are not supposed to be engaged in any business,” Melissa Marsh, a Los Angeles attorney who helps revive suspended companies told the Orange County Register. “They are not allowed to collect any money. The banks have a right to close their accounts.” Sundiver International previously operated as Sundiver Inc., under owner Ray Arntz. Sundiver Inc. was also suspended by the Franchise Tax Board on May 1, 2008, for unfiled tax returns, state records show. So was Sundiver Charters LLC on March 3, 2014. Arntz, who’s still registered with the state as Sundiver’s president and CEO, did not respond to Orange County Register's requests for comment on the story.

There are of course some who will point out that these could be isolated incidents, exceptions that prove the rule that dive charters are very safe and that getting left behind, although a divers worst nightmare, is as likely as being struck by lightening. Well, as the Sundiver story shows lightening does strike twice, in fact it strikes an awful lot. Take a cursory glance through the diving press and online and you'll find that the diving world is surrounded by a smoky fog of lightening strikes.

In Antigua in 2007, that's nine years since the disappearance of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, two British divers were abandoned for five hours when the dive boat weighed anchor and left. The two Dive Masters and one Instructor aboard seem to have miscounted and were only made aware that 2 of the 13 divers who were supposed to be aboard were missing when the divers wives inquired about their husbands whereabouts when the boat returned to dock. Fortunately, both were rescued, although they did suffer sunburn, cuts and stings during their ordeal. The outcome however could have been very different with rescuers of the two men slamming the dive crew as “breathtakingly irresponsible”.

In 2008, and for the Dive Masters out there, that's ten years since the Lonergan incident, a British man and his American girlfriend were left stranded overnight off the Great Barrier Reef. The two divers surfaced some 200 yards from the charter boat and despite waving frantically the crew did not notice and sailed away – another apparent head count gone wrong. The pair, adrift in the darkness, clung to each other overnight. Hypothermia began to set in as did the thought of what lurked in the darkness beneath. They were rescued the following morning by helicopter, the pilot who winched them to safety commenting that “they were in surprisingly good humour”.

 

In 2011, and once again on the Great Barrier Reef an American Snorkeller was stranded 30 miles offshore when his charter boat also sailed away. Again the victim of a mistaken head count. Fortunately for Ian Cole, he managed to swim for 15 minutes to reach a another boat that was anchored nearby. 

 

Later in 2011, Paul Kline and Fernando Garcia Puerta had to cling to a buoy for two hours after surfacing from their late-afternoon dive in the Atlantic Ocean three miles from Miami and finding no trace of their boat.'We were in shock. We could easily have died,' Kline, 44, told the Miami Herald.'If night had fallen, the situation would have turned into panic.'He said they kept talking to each other throughout their ordeal 'to try to keep up our high spirits'. Mr Kline said that he initially thought there had been a medical emergency aboard the boat, which is why it was not there when he and Mr Garcia surfaced 55 minutes into the first dive after studying coral reef. He said he assumed another boat would be sent back for them. Instead, the other divers on the trip had already boarded and the boat was en route to the second dive site with the captain unaware he had left the two behind. The captain of the dive boat, Mike Beach, refused to discuss the incident with reporters, saying only: 'Everybody is OK, no one is hurt, everybody is happy.' In 2005, British divers Louise Woodger and Gordon Pratley were rescued in the same area after being missing for four hours. They were found suffering from exposure and hypothermia after currents forced them away from their boat.

Even the most vociferous defender of “diving charters” would have to admit that the examples above do not paint a very good picture but such defenders would also no doubt reiterate that these incidents, horrific and distressing as they are, are the exceptions. They would probably also say that using diving charters is perfectly safe and that more people die from road accidents, DIY accidents and falling down stairs than on diving charters. This is absolutely true, but as a defence it is pathetic. The examples above aren't a description of some unusual unforeseen accident, they were the result of staggering incompetence. In fact, and this is just our opinion, they are the result of criminal negligence. All of them have one thing in common. The people responsible, simply failed to count. They had no idea who was in the water and who wasn't. In the case of Dan Carlock, he was marked on the roster twice when he was clearly – unless you're a mathematically challenged dive leader – not on board. Then there is the fact that in 2015, when the Sundiver Express left yet another diver behind, the company shouldn't even have been trading. 

 

Time after time, incident after incident the failure to carry out an effective head count or roll call has left divers in danger or led directly to deaths. How in all that is holy, can such incidents still be happening? How are the so called Dive Masters, Dive Leaders and Instructors throughout the world not utterly embarrassed that such incidents have not only happened but continue to happen? And don't think the blame lies just with the Instructors, Masters, et al. There were a great many other divers aboard these ships, did they not notice their numbers were a little short? Did none of these divers think to themselves that it was odd that the blonde girl, the bald bloke or the nice looking couple had suddenly vanished? Did none of them have the wherewithal to speak up? What sort of training are these divers receiving if responsibility for the safety of their fellow divers can be abdicated so easily? The whole diving industry should be ashamed of itself, it should get its head out of the sand and start to accept that being left behind by your charter boat is a very real and very present danger. 

 

ID Tag System, simple and effective

So what can be done? Well, Dive Masters and Instructors the world over seem to have a very rudimentary grasp of maths, so making sure that they can count would be a start. But roll calls and head counts are clearly not enough and should be backed up by a diver identification system like the Divers Alert Network DIDs boards. Recreational divers are given a tag they attach to their equipment, a tag missing from the board means a diver is still in the water. The boat doesn't leave until a roll call is carried out and all tags are back on the board. It's not brain surgery is it? Still as we have said before, there are a great many Instructors, Leaders and Jedi Masters (well they think they are) out there with all the badges and all the certificates in the world but not a brain cell between them. So relying on them alone is not good enough. What is needed to back up the roll calls and DIDs is ruthless prosecutions of those whose incompetence or negligence leads to such events. People need to go to prison and business need to be sued to destruction. But we would go further, every diving association that issues the certificates that allows people to run diving businesses need to be held to account as well. If one of their members is found to be incompetent or negligent, then that association should face heavy fines. Only when PADI, SSI, BSAC and the plethora of other badge selling organisations out there are made to face the consequences of their members actions will the industry have a chance of getting rid of all the incompetents that quite clearly infest it. The Associations would of course fight tooth and nail to stop such a thing a happening, they're are in the business of selling badges and certificates not safety so we won't hold our breath (no pun intended).

So if you thinking about going on a dive charter in 2016, we wish you luck and hope that the boat is still there when you surface, because as the examples above demonstrate, there's absolutely no guarantee it will be. And that really is shaming. 

Links

The Sundiver Express 2004 Incident

The Sundiver Express 2015 Incident

2007 Incident

2008 Incident

2011 First Incident

2011 Second Incident

Think It couldn't happen to you! Think again...

 

The Sport Diver Team Meet Brad And His Pressured Novices.

Mark Evans, if you didn’t know, is the editor of Sport Diver Magazine, the official PADI publication in the U.K and in December's issue he uses his Editor’s letter column to relate some disturbing incidents that he and his team witnessed whilst on a trip to Malta and Gozo. Here are the relevant (verbatim) bits from Mark’s missive.

Our trip was sadly marred by bad weather, namely strong winds which rendered many sites off limits, yet I was shocked that some independent groups of divers were still attempting to get in, or had got in, at sites that experienced centres had deemed unfit. At one location, I saw three well-known centres rock up in their vans; the instructors surveyed the conditions, and then called the dive, heading off to find more-suitable surroundings for their divers. Yet there were a group of obviously fairly inexperienced divers who were being badgered and cajoled by their group leader that “it was fine” and “this is what we are trained for”, Christ, these were pleasure divers, it wasn’t a Special Forces drill!

At another site, I saw a couple who were clearly novices, and they had a bit of a battle getting out of the water due to the swell washing up and down the ironshore. Their instructor was stood up above them on the shoreline helpfully telling them to hurry up but not offering them any assistance!

So please, whether you are diving in Malta and Gozo, right here in the U.K., or anywhere else for that matter, make your own mind up about the conditions and whether you want to dive. Do not feel pressured to get into the water – any instructor or dive leader worth their salt would not make you do anything you didn’t want to do. And remember if you do go in despite your reservations and it all goes horribly pear-shaped, the odds are that the person who ends up in serious trouble will be you, not your instructor. 

 

Hello, we're your dive leaders for today's pleasure trip - lock and load wimps!

Oh Mark, you’ve made us so happy we want to have your children! Finally someone associated with PADI has spotted what we, and many likes us, have been banging on about for what seems an eternity. Namely, that the world of diving is stuffed to the rafters with Brads; those moronic, badge wearing, hyper-egos who equate being a dive team leader/instructor with being a member of an elite commando unit and consequently tend to get people injured or killed due to their habit of being controlled by their testicles and not their brains.  And Mark, we are also delighted that you have brought to a wider audience our own little piece of advice that we have regularly exhorted on these pages, which is: your safety is, at the end of the day, your own responsibility. There are just a couple of things we like to raise however. We are not sure what you mean by “independent groups” but by the way you highlighted this we assume that they were not PADI registered which, again we assume, means that you are trying to distance the PADI organisation from such events. This would be unwise Mark and a little naive. Just take a peek around the web for diving deaths/incidents and you’ll find that, from Australia to Belize, an awful lot of divers who’ve lost their lives were in fact under the care of PADI registered centres/operations. Brad is everywhere Mark, everywhere!

Then there is something that we found rather disappointing, both your advice and our own requires the “novices” to do something that is often quite difficult, which is to challenge the diver leader/instructor. A lot of people Mark, don’t like confrontation and those who are very inexperienced have no reference point, they are being told to do something by someone who is covered in badges and is “supposed” to be experienced and subsequently “knows what they are doing”. Now we, and you Mark, know that isn’t always true but here’s a thing. You Mark are the editor of Sport Diver, you were with the Sport Diver team and yet you didn’t seem able to challenge those independent instructors either! Could you not have intervened Mark? Could you not have wandered over with your cohorts, flashed your own badges and told those novices that they didn’t have to do anything they didn’t want to? Because Mark, it is a very bad thing for those who are supposed to be the experts to lead those without experience into dangerous situations but it is just as bad, if not worse, for those who are experienced, those who realise that it is just a pleasure dive and not a Special Forces Drill as you say, to just stand there on the sidelines like a bunch of gormless rubberneckers at the scene of a car crash. We would have challenged Mark, we would have said something; in fact we would have ridiculed the instructor mercilessly and deflated their ego very quickly. We hope the next time you see something similar that you and all the other experienced divers out there will do the same. Because in truth Mark, the safety of novice divers is not just the instructors’ responsibility it’s everyone’s responsibility. So next time, don’t just stand there thinking this will make a good few column inches Mark - do something!

Diving Safety – Who's Really Looking After You?

Imagine you are new to the world of diving. You’ve recently completed your week-long diving course and are looking forward to your first real diving holiday. You may be green behind the ears but what’s to worry about? After all, every diving magazine and website is full of advertisements for dive charters and centres who claim that safety, your safety, is their paramount concern. All you have to do is book up, pay up and in a few months time you could be in a tropical paradise, preparing for an underwater adventure, safe in the knowledge that the dive company you’re using has taken care of all those niggling little safety issues. Of course if that’s the case, the spate of recent diving accidents hitting the headlines might just be setting off a few alarm bells in your head. In fact it would be fair to say that the last few months news coverage has been woefully bad for the sports credibility when it comes to safety. To illustrate this let us take you through a few incidents that, in our opinion, paint a worrying picture for any of you interested in taking up the sport. 

A recent coroner’s inquest into the death of Melanie Stoddart, who died whilst on a diving holiday in the Maldives in 2012, has highlighted some disturbing issues with the emergency procedures in place on the Islands.

The inquest in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, heard how Miss Stoddart, an experienced diver from Greater Manchester, had arrived in the Maldives on April 2012 with her boyfriend. She had been on the same holiday the previous year. On the third day of her organised trip, she was in a party of 12 holidaymakers and two instructors who went to Vaavu Atoll for the last scuba dive of the day just after 3pm. This was her third dive of the day. The inquest was told she returned to the surface after about 30 minutes and asked for medical assistance, as she was feeling unwell. Doctors were called and she was taken to the Alimatha Aquatic Resort nearby. When it became clear her condition was deteriorating the resort's doctor said she needed to be taken to a decompression chamber, but there was no transport available. A speedboat only arrived from neighbouring Bandos Island, more than 40 miles away, when insurance checks had been carried out. A doctor sedated Ms Stoddart, but decided she was not stable enough to be put in a decompression chamber. She was then transferred for a second time by boat six miles to the capital where CT scans of her head and chest were taken at the ADK Hospital.  But at 2.15am the next morning she went into cardiac arrest and died thirty minutes later. 

Peter Stoddart told the court his daughter was a qualified diving instructor and member of a club who had dived all over the world. He said the family had tried for many months to establish exactly what had happened in the hours before Miss Stoddart passed away. They spotted "discrepancies" in the reports from police and the tour company Scuba Tours Worldwide that raised serious questions about the safety procedures in place on that fateful afternoon.

 

Recording a narrative verdict, coroner Paul McCandless said: 'Melanie was a practiced and experienced sea diver who took unwell on a dive. Due to a lack of appropriate transport at that time of day there was a delay in taking her to an appropriate facility.

'Once there, there was a partial misdiagnosis that she was not suffering from decompression sickness. It is possible that if her condition had been diagnosed sooner that she would not have died when she did.' The Coroner added: 'Holidaymakers need to be aware of what emergency procedures are in place should any particular difficulties arise.' 

After the hearing, Melanie's mother Irene, said: 'My daughter's death was down to sheer incompetence. She received no treatment for nine hours, how can that be right?'

A full report is here

Then there is the case of American citizen Roger Pieper, who died whilst diving the Blue Hole in Belize this year. The Blue Hole is a notorious dive spot and has regularly claimed the lives of divers. Once again however there are troubling contradictions and discrepancies in the witness statements.

The official police report by the Belize City Police Department, states that Pieper, a retired pilot from Texas, along with his family, employed Amigos Del Mar Dive Center  for a dive trip to the Blue Hole. The group arrived at the Blue Hole and proceeded to dive. At about 50 feet below the surface, Pieper started to experience complications and alerted the dive crew. By the time Pieper was brought to the surface he had already fallen unconscious. The Belize Coast Guard was contacted to transport Pieper to the Karl Huesner Memorial Hospital in Belize City. Pieper was pronounced dead on arrival. A post mortem examination certified the cause of death as asphyxia due to drowning. 

The initial incident reports taken by the San Pedro police were comprised of statements issued by Amigos Del Mar employees. According to the report the crew had learned that Pieper had undergone triple bypass surgery last year as he suffered from heart problems. They also indicated that his condition was not reported to the dive company prior to the dive since persons suffering from heart conditions are not allowed to dive. Reports from the family however dispute this, saying that: as a First Class Pilot, Pieper suffered from no medical conditions and was in optimal health. The dive centre in question, Amigo’s Del Mar was expelled from the PADI diving organisation in 2014. Although the reasons for the expulsion are not clear, the dive centre had been embroiled in a case of sexual assault prior to the PADI expulsion. A police investigation into the death of Roger Pieper is ongoing and serious questions remain about what exactly happened and why there are contrary statements as to Mr Pieper’s medical condition prior to diving. Although expelled from PADI the dive centre is still affiliated to a number of other diving organisations.

The full report is here
PADI Expulsion
Amigo's Del Mar’s response to the sexual assault allegations

Finally there is the truly distressing case of Bethany Farrell. In February of this year Bethany was taking part in a try-dive on the Great Barrier Reef. Bethany had been snorkelling before but had never dived before. It is reported that Bethany and two other students were to be guided by an instructor on the dive. However one of the other students refused to dive, though the exact reason as to why they refused is not known. This left the instructor with Bethany and one other novice. At some point during the dive, the instructor lost sight of Bethany and could not locate her. Bethany was later found at a depth of 11 metres. A post mortem determined the cause of death as drowning. Following the tragedy, two people who were on board the dive boat at the time took to Trip Advisor to question the dive operator’s actions during and after the incident. Including making the claim that photos were deleted. Bethany’s father, Patrick Farrell, said the loss of photographs was incomprehensible.
“There is no excuse,’’ Mr Farrell told the Courier Mail. “Grave mistakes have been made. Ultimately her life was in their hands. Now she’s dead.

“NEVER TRAVEL WITH WINGS DIVING ADVENTURES!!!”

I had a very negative experience with Wings Diving Adventures in mid February. One of the girls on the boat had a horrible, horrible scuba dive accident after being separated from her instructor. While they were looking for her, the other divers on the boat were locked into the kitchen area for 3 and a half hours, and not once did one of the crew members come to speak to us about what was wrong. Not a single sentence. We were all scared and confused and I was feeling very crammed and getting a bit claustrophobic by the end. I understand that this was a major accident, and the crew was panicking, but it was COMPLETELY unprofessional to leave us down there.

The girl who had the accident was found dead, and what's worst is that I now know that they deleted all of the pictures that had been taken on the boat before they could give it to the girl's family or police.

“We lost our friend on this boat”

What was supposed to be a dream trip turned into the worst possible nightmare. We will not go into detail about what happened but we would like to address the way the crew dealt with the situation.

All passengers were locked in downstairs without being told what had happened, including myself and my friend, when we were directly involved.
The full reviews can be found here
  
So what should we make of these reports from three separate locations around the world? In truth we’re not sure. We know full well that there are a multitude of reputable, experienced and highly professional operators out there. But that doesn’t really help does it? After all how do you tell the good from the bad? Melanie Stoddart was a trained diving instructor herself and the Coroner noted that she had signed on with a reputable company, yet can anyone honestly say that the procedures in place for dealing with a suspected case of decompression sickness were adequate? And what of Roger Pieper? Again he was an experienced diver and yet again questions remain over events and the dive operators response. And finally there is Bethany Farrell, who was simply taking part in a try-out dive. How does a complete diving novice get separated from the person who was supposed to be taking care of her? Why did the other student refuse to dive? Why did the crew lock other passengers in the Galley? And why did staff apparently delete all the photographs they had taken?

Those who have read our other posts will know that we are not exactly big on Health and Safety. We’ve always maintained that your personal safety is your own responsibility. We say this because we tend to find that Health and Safety procedures really are nothing more than a tick-box exercise. Stick up a few procedures on the back of the toilet door, have a quick ten minute brief, stick a diver down flag in the water and away you go, all boxes ticked and everyone’s safe right?

When we go in the water to do some of the silly stuff we do, it’s on our own responsibility. We don’t expect anyone to come to our aid and we plan for that accordingly. But importantly we do not ask people to pay us money to take them snorkelling; we don’t run a diving business either.

Finally there is something that we’ve been banging on about for ages, which is our belief that a certain type of diving instructor is infesting the world of sport diving, a type that we call Brad. Brad equates being a diving instructor to being an SAS soldier, which of course it isn’t. Brad doesn’t understand that being an instructor is about educating others, it’s about imparting knowledge and more importantly imparting experience but then Brad is barely out of his twenties, wears camouflage clothing with lots of “Dive Master” badges or other such silly emblems sewn on and of course has very little experience.

So lets go back to our newly trained diver planning that trip of a lifetime what should they do? Who should they give their money to? How do they spot the good operators from the cowboys? How they differentiate between Brad, who wears all the same badges and has all the same affiliations to diving organisations as the good instructors? We really don’t know the answer to this but we think the world of sport diving, particularly the diving organisations, need to seriously start looking for one. Diving charters and companies around the world are asking divers of all abilities to put their trust in them, to put their very lives in their hands. But as these incidents show, we’re not sure that’s something anyone should do.  

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?