For this week’s installment of, lessons learned as a scuba instructor, lets look at one of those bizarre behaviors only seen during checkout dives.
Here’s the scenario. You’re teaching an open water diver course. Your students have performed well in their pool work, and have made it to their open water dives. You bring them to the platform, sandy bottom, or wherever else you’re teaching and start to run through skills. They display out of air signs perfectly. They perform their free flowing regulator skill perfectly. They perform their partially flooded mask skill perfectly. They move on to their fully flooded mask skill and do great. You then give them the signal to remove and replace their mask. They reconfirm their connection to the bottom, take a deep breath, reach up, and remove their mask and woooooooooooooo, they toss it away like one of the Manning brothers! I may be crazy, but it always seemed to me that one would want their mask for the rest of their dive. Seeing is just one of those things that most people cherish.
Divers of the world, you can admit it, this probably occurred at least once on your checkout dive. Instructors, you can also admit, you’ve seen it, and probably are guilty of it “way back when”. For all the dives I’ve done, and all the classes I’ve taught, I will never understand what causes open water divers to throw their mask away during this skill. I’ve gone back and double-checked the text to make sure it doesn’t refer to the skill as “loose your mask and get your instructor to find it”. The dive curriculum makes no mention of finding such things until Search and Recovery Diver. Still, I would say that at least 20% of certification candidates do this. It’s one of the great mysteries of the deep.
If I did most of my teaching in warm clear waters, right on the sandy bottom, this really wouldn’t be more than a minor hiccup. However in Maryland we do most of our teaching in cold, dark quarries with nice thick silt bottoms, which are often 40’+ under the platform where the divers perform their skills. These conditions make the prospect of hunting for a student’s mask less than appealing, not to mention terribly impractical.
All this being said, I’ve adapted! Nothing in the Divemaster’s manual refers to being a goalie, but this is indeed a great description of a divemaster during this particular certification dive. Pre-dive, we (my divemaster and myself) take note of who’s right or left handed, and position them to that side of the student during this skill. So, when the student inevitably takes their mask off and tosses it away, it magically finds its way right back into their hands. It’s as if some mermaid with an unhealthy sense of goodwill was waiting to keep the dive on track.
Although it rarely seems funny to the student until they’ve been handed their c-card, the fact that it happens with such predictability really just makes this even funnier. But it’s all-good! Remember, the first rule of diving is to never hold your breath, but the second rule is to learn to laugh at yourself, learn from your mistakes and be a better, safer, and happier diver. Always be prepared for the unexplainable, yet predictably unpredictable.
Scott Shenton
www.scottshenton.com
