One of the traditional ways of starting a technical diving class is with accident analysis: the instructor presents a few real diving accidents, and the students try to identify how things went wrong and what they can do to prevent it from happening to them. This kind of introduction isn’t as common for recreational diving classes, but maybe it should be. You can learn a lot from accident analysis, and it’s a good reminder that the rules for safe diving are written in blood.
The theme I would pick for accident analysis in a Open Water class is “trust me” dives. This is when a diver isn’t comfortable doing a particular dive, but their buddy (or even instructor) convinces them to do it anyway. Maybe they’re not comfortable with the depth, or going inside a wreck, but their buddy tells them “trust me”, it’ll be fine. Usually it is. Sometimes it isn’t.
There are lots of reasons people ignore their gut and do things they know are risky. Peer pressure and fear of missing out are two of them. As dive professionals, we need to recognize that we can be part of the problem – but we can also be part of the solution. Here’s what I mean:
It’s very common for students first learning to dive to be nervous. As they should be – humans weren’t made to breath underwater, SCUBA equipment is complex, and there are a lot of unknown unknowns. Helping them get past their fears is one of the best parts of teaching, and there are several ways of doing it. One common and problematic way is the “exposure therapy” approach. This is when the instructor encourages the student that, whatever it is they’re scared of doing, they can do it, and that they will be right there with the student if there are any problems. This method does help students become more confident, but there are two reason I don’t like it.
First, students’ concerns are usually real. For example, if a student is worried about going deeper because they’re not sure they’ll be able to clear their mask if it floods, they’re probably right. Even if that student has already demonstrated all the skills to respond to potential problems, being able to demonstrate a skill and being able to do it during a real situation are not the same thing, and the student is the only one who can tell the difference.
Second, the exposure therapy approach teaches that the way to become a better diver is by diving outside of your comfort zone. This can lead to Normalization of Deviance, where a diver assumes that they won’t have problems because they haven’t had problems in the past. When a diver slowly expands their comfort zone over time without actually improving their skills to match, they can be completely unprepared when a real problem occurs.
Instead of the exposure therapy approach, a better way of helping divers grow is to let them set the pace of their progress, while emphasizing that they need to be confident in their ability to handle any foreseeable problems for every dive. “Trust me” dives are unacceptable – and that includes the training dives for this class.
If this sounds unrealistic, remember that for the first training dive in shallow end of a pool, the solution to every problem is to stand up. Question? Stand up. Mask leaking? Stand up. Just not having a good time? Stand up. From there, it’s all incremental. Students learn mask clearing, regulator recovery, and gas sharing in the shallow end so that they’re prepared and confident going to the deep end of the pool. In the deep end, they practice buoyancy control so that they’re prepared and confident going into open water.
Instructors can preach all day about how “trust me” dives are bad, but if they teach in a way that requires students to do “trust me” dives during the class, the message will be lost. On the other hand, when a student is able to complete their open water class without ever feeling like their safety is in someone else’s hands, they’re not likely to give that up on future dives. (As a bonus, divers that feel self-sufficient are more likely to enjoy diving and be repeat customers.)