Vandit Kalia
One thing I have realised in speaking to divers of all experience levels – from beginners to instructors – is that most of them have a very incorrect perception of what the dive industry is all about. I see newer divers have a blind faith in the content they are taught, assuming it to be designed towards making them good divers. I see experienced divers complaining about training standards and how they seem to be slipping. And I see instructors also working on the assumption that the training standards for a particular course are all that there is to follow. And I see people across all spectrums of the diving world blaming agencies for any accidents or incidents that happen, or for a failure to enforce standards or whatever.
All of them are wrong (except me, of course :)).
And the purpose of this click-baity headline is to get a very serious point across about the diver mindset.
Let’s put this in context. Dive agencies are for-profit, privately-owned businesses that are selling a product for profit. And what is that product? It isn’t training standards – it is liability protection for dive centres and dive professionals.
How does it work? If you walk into a dive center and say you want to dive, but have no idea on what diving is all about, the liability for any injury that may happen falls upon the dive center or pro conducting the program: they have to prove that they were not negligent . After all, you, as a newcomer to the sport, have no idea what the risks are and cannot meaningfully accept the responsibility for their own safety. On the other hand, if you walk into a dive center as a full trained, certified diver who knows the risks of diving as well as the techniques to manage that risk, you can indeed take legal responsibility for your own safety. In other words, the liability for anything that goes wrong shifts to you (of course, subject to no malfeasance on the part of the dive center/professional, etc etc).
What dive agencies do is provide a means for transferring this responsibility for safety (and associated liability in the event something goes wrong) from the dive center/pro to the diver. They do so by defining standards as to what constitutes adequate training to become a certified diver, who knows the techniques involved in diving safely. They say “if you learn X, Y and Z, you know how to dive safely, you know the risks and you how to handle those risks”. So now, once you have a diver who is trained in the sport, they are now capable of accepting the responsibility of their own safety.
Now if there is a dive accident and again, assuming no malfeasance on the part of the dive center or professional, they can say “hey, the diver is trained in the sport and has the skills and knowledge to be responsible for their own safety, as per industry standards prevalent across the world. It is not our fault – if you have a problem with this, take it up with the people who set the standards for how much training is needed for this.”
And that’s where it gets hard. Because the standards arent just set by PADI or SSI or NAUI – it is set by all of them combined, the umbrella body known as the World Recreational Scuba Training Council. So now who has the expertise to stand up and say that ALL the experts employed by all these agencies are wrong? No one. Risk mitigated.
So let me repeat: training standards exist solely for the purpose of providing the divers with enough skills and knowledge to take on the responsibility for their own safety.
Now of course, being able to dive safely is a key part of this – even the WRSTC would be hard placed to defend their standards if people get injured a lot. So it isn’t that these standards are poor or unsafe or anything like it – quite the contrary. Despite what some people moan about online, diving is a very safe sport and has continued to be so for a long time, mainly because of the near-universal acceptance of these standards.
What these standards are not designed, however, is to necessarily create GOOD divers – they are designed to provide a minimum level of competence needed to be safe. And while the Venn diagram for these two overlap quite a bit, they do not coincide to one hundred percent.
The reason for this is that dive agencies are not gatekeepers to the sport: a privately-owned company somewhere in the US or Australia or Germany doesn’t really have any basis for setting a competence-related bar to who can participate in the sport. They can define what is needed to be safe, they can impart that knowledge to the diver – but after that, it is up to each diver to take the necessary steps to ensure their own safety. That’s actually an explicitly-stated part of the bargain, along the lines of: “now that you know what the risks are and what the required skills are, it is up to you to make sure you are capable“.
The other part has to do with maintaining your skills – if you don’t dive for a while, your skills will atrophy. It is simply not possible for others to ensure that your skills are still as good as they were a year or two ago, when you dived last. That’s why you, the diver, need to step up and take ownership of getting better: it’s your job, not the agency’s.
So maintaining their competence is a responsibility of the diver – which makes perfect sense: as certified divers, we all need to be personally responsible for our own safety and not rely on a dive pro to handle the basics of watching our depth/air/NDL. It is also our responsibility as certified divers to make sure our skills are current and to ask for remedial training/refreshers as needed. That’s why we do training courses – so we know what our limits are and when to ask for additional support/supervision – the dive pros are there to help identify issues that a diver may not be aware of, and to act as safety nets in the event something goes wrong.
That is not to say you have to do it alone or that you won’t get any support on the dive. Not at all.
There is a group of people who do care about developing competence and ensuring safety. Those people are called dive pros (well, the good ones, anyway). Good dive instructors realise that just checking off a bunch of skills from the standard manual isn’t enough to create good divers: they go above and beyond the minimum, and try to make sure divers really are comfortable with the skills (atleast to the point that they can continue to get better on their own) as well as the right mental attitude. In the same vein, good divemasters will also provide tips to certified divers if they notice any issues that need addressing – but it is then up to the diver to accept that input.
So there are plenty of resources available for you to get better or even get some support while you are on a dive trip – which is especially useful for newer divers who may be a little nervous. It’s just that the drive for acquiring this has to come from you.
