Let’s Teach the Good
Ol’ Fashioned Way…
When I started teaching in the mid-1970s, the typical “scuba” course was eight to ten sessions long. To call this a “scuba” course was a bit of a misnomer, however, because students seldom got to see a scuba cylinder until the fourth night of class.
At the time, there was a prevailing belief that, before you could be a scuba diver, you first had to learn to be a “skin diver” (what we today more accurately call a breath hold diver or free diver).
We’re not talking about having your students spend a few minutes paddling around the pool in masks and fins, so that they’re comfortable with the equipment before donning a scuba unit. No, we’re talking about spending several pool sessions and a number of hours learning to clear masks, do mask/snorkel/fins ditch-and-recoveries, etc., before ever getting to touch a scuba tank.
As horse-collar BCs became more readily available, it became a common practice to have students wear them during the “skin diving” phase of the course. After all, doing so made divers safer — right?
When your aunt and uncle go on vacation, the cruise ship most likely gives them a small, inflatable vest to wear on snorkeling excursions. Doing so helps bolster weak swimmers’ confidence, limits the cruise ship’s liability and provides everyone involved with a nice security blanket. It’s not as though any of these people (most of whom have limited experience in the water) are actually going to leave the surface, deflating and inflating their vest each time they do.
The irony is that no serious breath hold diver would ever wear any sort of inflatable device. Is this because they have a callous attitude toward safety? Hardly. It’s because, after surfacing with a low blood oxygen level and an equally high concentration of CO2, the last thing you want to be doing is huffing and puffing into an inflatable vest in an effort to support yourself.
Real breath hold divers wear wet suits and weight themselves to be slightly positive at the surface. This way, when they return to the surface, they don’t have to fight to stay there. If, for any reason, this is insufficient, they have the option to drop their weights or hold on to a float, surf mat, kayak or boogie board that can be waiting for them at the surface (and never needs inflating).
By the early 1980s, the standard of practice became to have entry-level students spend as much time in scuba equipment as possible. This was, in part, in recognition of the fact that, as enjoyable as breath-hold diving is for many of us, it’s just not an essential part of scuba diving. It was also due to the fact that, with the advent of jacket-style and back-inflation BCs, it was no longer possible to make BCs do double duty as snorkeling vests.
Now you are probably assuming that, because this is most likely how you teach, it’s how everyone does. Guess again. I actually saw this, just two years ago:
I’d volunteered to help out with a friend’s weekend scuba class. I had explained that I’d be getting there late, as I had other obligations. Imagine my surprise, then, when I arrived at a point where the class was already more than a quarter of the way through the eight hours of pool time allotted for its entire “scuba” course, and saw the student’s tanks sitting by the side of the pool, untouched.
The students were out in the middle of the pool, flailing around in bulky, jacket-style BCs (with no tanks), trying to learn to “free dive.” It was like the 1970s all over again — but with equipment even less well suited for the task.
I’m sorry, but if you seriously think that anyone in their right mind would ever go snorkeling while wearing a big, bulky jacket-style BC with no tank in it, you’ve got your head so far up a certain bodily orifice, it’s never seeing daylight (’hope you enjoy the smell). But here’s the catch:
It wasn’t that my friend was teaching in a manner she thought was wise. No, this was what her training agency thought was a good way to teach “scuba.”
Surprised? Don’t be. There are still so-called “major training agencies” that have not changed their basic approach to skill development since the 1970s — despite the fact today’s equipment just isn’t conducive to this sort of backward thinking.
Even instructors affiliated with supposedly more “progressive” agencies still conduct skill development and open-water training in a manner that is not substantially different from the way their mothers and fathers did in the 1970s and 1980s. The problem is, they are trying to do so in a shorter number of hours than ever before. Guess what? As often as not, it doesn’t work.
“But my training agency makes me do it that way.” Yes, but only because you let it. All of us need to be pushing our respective agencies to keep the training materials and methods we use as up to date as the equipment we sell and the technology that is part of our customer’s every day life.
If we don’t, we’re just going to keep losing customers to other recreational activities whose leaders don’t seem to revel as much as ours do in living in the past.
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