Why Do Things Like This Happen?
If there is one principal common to all diver training organizations, it is that confined water (i.e., pool) training exists to give students the opportunity to master the fundamental skills of scuba diving before adding the stress of an unfamiliar and, often, more challenging environment. It’s also understood that instructors are not to take students to open water until they have not only demonstrated mastery of these skills, but a high degree of comfort with them as well.
Unfortunately, in the real world of diver training, this doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as it should. For example:
When I was running Lahaina Divers, we did a lot of open-water training referrals for students from the mainland. I can’t tell you the number of times students asked me, during pre-dive briefings, “Are we going to have to take off our masks? I have a lot of difficulty with that.”
“But you did successfully remove, replace and clear your mask in the pool, didn’t you?” I’d ask in reply.
“Well, not really…”
In theory, when a student tells you this, you are supposed to send them packing, telling them not to return until they had, in fact, mastered all of the necessary skills.
In reality, if you did this, you’d lose three-quarters of your open-water referral customers (not to mention ruin more than a few people’s vacations).
What our new instructors quickly learned is that they had to be prepared to re-teach almost an entire beginning scuba course before many of our referral students would be ready to complete their open-water training dives.
::: TOP ::: SUBSCRIBE ::: CONTACT US ::: ABOUT US :::