Amateur clubs have many strengths. Often they teach scuba diving with far smaller instructor/student ratios compared to commercially run dive schools. So there's more personal attention. Because clubs usually have many very experienced divers in them, you can learn a great deal simply from being around these individuals, providing a mentor program that's invaluable. By pooling members' financial resources, amateur scuba diving clubs can provide their members with low cost use of air compressors for filling tanks, dive boats and meeting rooms. Amateur dive clubs often organise holidays as a group, providing members with access to travel discounts. They don't sell equipment, so have no vested interest in pushing gear sales. But amateur scuba training clubs aren't perfect for everybody. Diving clubs often rely on experienced divers rather than formally trained and qualified diving instructors to teach newbies. Club members who don't want to teach can find themselves pressured to give up their free time to train others anyway or to provide other services to their dive club. This is often to the detriment of their own diving activities. The fact that clubs often take many months to train a diver because of limited pool time (usually only an hour or so a week) also puts many people off club scuba training.
Professional scuba diving instructors in the UK normally belong to organisations such as British Sub-Aqua Club Schools, the BSAC's commercial wing (sometimes at odds with the founding amateur side of the BSAC), the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI), Scuba Schools International (SSI) or the National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI). These organisations have laid down training systems and require that almost all scuba training must be personally conducted by a trained and qualified scuba diving instructor. Just like amateur scuba training groups, BSAC Schools, PADI, SSI and NAUI all offer internationally recognised certification and alongside entry-level scuba training courses also provide a range of add on scuba training courses to help you build scuba diving skills and get the most from special interest scuba diving activities.
Professional scuba diving instructors can offer fast track scuba training courses that can have you scuba diving very quickly and that is one of the reasons professional scuba diving instructors are in demand. They can also more easily offer referrals than amateur clubs, allowing you to go through classroom and pool work in the UK and then complete your open water diving overseas. This is because while amateur clubs' qualifications are accepted around the globe, amateur clubs based in the UK have few branches abroad. Consequently it's likely to be difficult to pick up your training where you left off on an overseas holiday with limited time. Volunteer clubs just aren't usually set up for this. Professional dive associations, especially those originating from the USA, such as NAUI Worldwide (Mavericks Diving London's choice), SSI and PADI, have instructors and dive centres all over the world, so chances are you can easily find an instructor to complete your scuba training course with. They are geared up to running training for people on holiday and can work fast to accommodate your time frame. Compared to amateur scuba diving clubs they must cover greater overheads in a very competitive market, This can lead to high student to instructor ratios, shortened pool time and, increasingly, self-study or e-learning (which are replacing classroom sessions with human instructors).
It isn't well known, but scuba diving instructors do not have to be particularly experienced scuba divers themselves. As few as sixty dives may suffice. This can mean quite new and inexperienced divers teaching scuba training to others (some experts on dive safety and training estimate 100 hours underwater is required to become truly comfortable in your own scuba diving skills). At Mavericks Diving London, we could not envisage that we would want someone so new to the sport actually offering scuba training unsupervised. I believe you have to earn your spurs first and that only comes over time. I also believe one must choose teaching diving as a vocation. For many people becoming a scuba diving instructor is an escape from the dull day job, an ego trip or fills a vacant space because they don't really know what they want to do for a living.
In the UK both amateur and professional scuba diving instructors are supposed to adhere to scuba training standards laid down by the agency they belong to. Some discretion is allowed to account for local diving conditions. For example student numbers might need to be lowered or supervision increased for diving in a low visibility situation, such as a UK quarry. Professional scuba diving instructors also fall under jurisdiction of the Health and Safety Executive. Unfortunately scuba diving accidents still occur in training and investigation of UK scuba training student fatalities often indicates both the training agencies rules and the legal requirements of the HSE have been flouted by the scuba instructor in charge. The reality is that scuba diving instructors---amateur and professional---do sometimes gamble with students' lives and lose the bet. Scuba diving is an adventure sport in which getting hurt or being killed goes with the territory. Safety statistics are, at best, dubious. The number of divers out there, how many dives they make and the level of difficulty of each dive is not known. Claiming that scuba training and diving are really very safe isn't really the same as proving it. At Mavericks Diving London, we decided we would be transparent about the real risks of scuba training and diving as we saw them. Which is why we talk openly during scuba training about scuba diving accidents---in this way you can learn from others' mistakes, and make informed judgments about the risks of each dive.
The professional scuba diving instructor has an undeniable financial interest in qualifying divers. Only a qualified scuba diver is likely to buy scuba equipment or take advanced scuba training or purchase dive travel from the instructor. Professional scuba instructors often rely upon commissions from selling scuba diving equipment to make up their pay packet and on leading overseas trips to sell further specialty scuba training to bulk up their instructor fees. Often attaining senior instructor qualifications is linked to the number of scuba divers the instructor has personally trained. I believe that these incentives combined with paying piece rates (linking instructor fees directly to the number of students on a course) does sometimes lead to scuba training students not receiving adequate training. The drive to reduce overheads by limiting pool time, using assistants instead of qualified scuba instructors, reducing or eliminating classroom sessions, all while maximising the number of students on a learn to scuba dive course are precisely the shortcoming that I wanted to overcome with my own dive school.
At our London scuba training centre we're not too fussed about getting higher instructor rankings. Andrew and I are certainly driven to increase our own experience and learn new diving skills that we can pass onto our own students, but we really feel we've enough instructor ratings already. There's no longer a career incentive for us to chase student numbers. We pay a flat day rate to our instructors for each course they run. It isn't influenced by student numbers. We don't pay instructors or the retail crew a commission on scuba gear sales. Mavericks Diving is obviously a commercial operation. But we are not under huge financial pressure to qualify divers before they are ready. Ocean Optics, our underwater camera company, is reasonably successful and allows us the luxury to offer scuba training on our terms. Anyay, in the long term we'll lose your business if we cut corners. Or at least we should. We know what we offer and how we do it isn't for everyone, but that's your choice.
A disadvantage of the professional system is that there may not be much in place to support you once you qualify. So some professional scuba diving instructors and dive schools also have dive clubs. Usually the club has a strong social side, but members will buy training and dive travel through the commercial school or professional instructor. As with amateur clubs, clubs attached to schools are likely to have highly experienced divers among the members from whom you can learn tips of the trade as you go. The Mavericks Dive Club will be launched this year (2008). Our scuba club will provide members with regular presentations on all aspects of diving from experts in their field and offer monthly pool sessions at Action Underwater Studios to help you keep your watermanship skills up to speed.
Talking with professional divemasters, the guides at resorts and on liveaboards who see and supervise the diving activities of hundreds and sometimes thousands of divers each year provided more evidence that a lot of scuba divers were not well trained. Though fully qualified on paper, the harsh reality was they lacked safety awareness and had poor buoyancy skills, falling far short of the mark of a diver qualified at their level. In setting up our scuba training programs we tried to learn from what responsible diving professionals were telling us, our own experiences, and from diving incident reports. I also looked critically at my own mistakes as a scuba instructor. On my team we decided the thrust of our scuba training classes would be fewer students, increased time for learning and practicing scuba diving skills in the pool, additional off-menu skills to build self-confidence and a return to explaining theory in the classroom. We've tried to stand back and take an objective view of the situation and explore our options for helping people become really good divers. Divers we can be proud to sign off as properly trained and qualified and who in turn will be ambassadors, by their diving knowledge and scuba skills, for Mavericks Diving scuba training in London. Andrew and I have sought to fuse the advantages that the professional training organisations have to offer with the best qualities of the amateur diving clubs. We've invested in underwater radiophones so that we can talk to students underwater (just as are used in training skydivers and motorcyclists), mannequins for coaching in-water rescue methods and anatomical models for explaining the physics and physiology aspects of the scuba course academics. Total cost: just a few thousand pounds. But it looks like we're out on our own making this small investment in our scuba training classes.
Andrew and I decided after a lot of soul searching that for what we really wanted to accomplish with Mavericks Diving London, NAUI Worldwide offered us the best choice. Holding all the leadership level qualifications that we do, it would have been easier to stick with the agencies to which we already belonged and offer a better known and more commercial scuba training program and qualifications. Transferring to NAUI was expensive, both in terms of hard cash and time away. Worse than that, the theory examinations I had to pass were, by far, the hardest instructor papers I've ever faced. The attractions of NAUI Worldwide won out. I liked NAUI's stellar reputation among old hands and that experienced instructors are encouraged to use their own knowledge and experience to enhance their scuba training courses. We considered offering a choice of qualifications from several agencies, but ultimately felt trying to be all things to all people would be a compromise too far.
Entry level scuba training is broadly similar across the different training agencies that exist worldwide. All recreational scuba divers need to master some basic skills if they are to scuba dive safely. These include mask skills that ensure that should your mask become flooded or be kicked off underwater, you can refit it and evacuate the water from it. Regulators, the valves you breathe through, are something else you must learn to use. Basic buoyancy skills that will enable you to lie on the bottom, float at the surface or hover anywhere else in the water column that you please must also be mastered. You'll also learn problem management skills including donating air to another diver.
Different scuba training agencies will have some variations though. Some scuba training agencies require students to practice controlled emergency swimming ascents, a self-rescue skill for an out of air diver. Other scuba training agencies may only discuss it---students are prohibited from practicing the skill. Some entry level scuba training courses teach only very basic surface assists that will help you to help another diver. Others insist you learn how to bring an incapacitated scuba diver to the surface and are trained to administer resuscitation. Our NAUI Worldwide entry level scuba training classes require that we teach our students controlled emergency swimming ascents, how to bring a casualty to the surface and how to perform in-water resuscitation. We feel that these basic self-rescue and rescue skills are easy to learn and helped us make the decision to go exclusively with NAUI Worldwide.
To complete your scuba certification you'll need to make some open water dives. While the pool or other confined water is used to learn most key diving skills, open water is where these skills will be consolidated and evaluated. You'll also learn new techniques, such as navigation, that cannot be taught effectively in a swimming pool. While scuba diving in open water you'll work to greater depths and begin building experience. Four or so dives is all that is normally required to complete this part of your training. However, open water scuba training can pose problems and force compromises. Ideally, divers should train at a location that provides relatively shallow water for assessing skills (perhaps 5-6 metres) that's adjacent to deeper water (15-18 metres) for gaining experience at the depths the scuba diver will be qualified to explore upon certification. Many coastal locations in the UK don't provide this and the risk of being blown out by the weather is ever present. Inland dive sites are commonly used, especially by London dive schools, to get over this. But it must be admitted that diving in a lake or quarry is in no way representative of ocean diving.
Our view is that we'd really like to encourage people to scuba dive in the UK. The UK and many other temperate and even polar destinations offer simply stunning scuba diving. Within Scotland's Scapa Flow is world class scuba diving upon the scuttled World War One battleships of the German Navy. The world's second largest fish, the basking shark, is a regular visitor to our waters and cage diving with blue sharks takes place off Cornwall. Move farther afield and you have ice diving in Russia's White Sea and beneath Arctic and Antarctic pack ice. But we feel that the best route for us is to train people overseas and then, once they are qualified entry level scuba divers, introduce them to UK diving conditions under close supervision. Excellent locations Mavericks intends using include short haul destinations such as Dahab in the Egyptian Red Sea, the French Mediterranean Coast, Lanzarote in the Atlantic and Gibraltar, which straddles the Med and the Atlantic.
Entry level scuba training is just that. It means you are a beginner with a novice's skills and minimal real world scuba diving experience. Again, this is where Andrew and I started off---just like every scuba diver does. To that end, all scuba training agencies offer further training to help you build your experience by increasing the time you spend underwater. During these scuba training dives you'll also learn new skills that can help you take more control of your own diving and improve your personal safety. You'll also broaden the range of diving conditions you can handle, such as working in low visibility, scuba diving at night and making scuba dives beyond the 18 metres or so most entry level scuba divers are limited to. Some scuba training courses, such as advanced scuba courses, enhance your general scuba diving skills, others like underwater photography concentrate on providing knowledge and techniques for specific scuba diving interests. Rescue courses, as you'd expect, build your abilities to prevent scuba diving accidents, manage and solve problems when they do occur and teach you how to be a responsible buddy who can save a life.
At Mavericks Diving scuba training in London, we feel that it's a good idea to complete your entry level scuba training and then take an advanced scuba course immediately after, if possible. With us that would mean you'd made nearly a dozen dives under close professional guidance. We think that it's an important aspect of building time underwater, establishing self-confidence but not over-confidence and engendering the diving skills to let you gradually break away from us to enjoy your own diving adventures. After that, we think it's time to give courses a break and just go and do some diving. From there we'd encourage you to book onto a NAUI Rescue Diver workshop to learn the skills that will make diving unsupervised that much safer.
Good diving.
Steve.
See also:
- The Mavericks training philosophy
- Mavericks scuba qualification courses
- Mavericks instructor Steve Warren
- Mavericks instructor Andrew Pugsley