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THE TEDIUM OF CHECKLIST DIVING
NIGEL EATON, EDITOR
IN THIS MONTH'S Diver, John Bantin takes an iconoclastic look at some of the best-loved rules in diving. Among the targets is the idea of always "diving the plan", which, says John, can lead to safety problems if followed too rigidly.
But excessive dive planning can be unsatisfactory in other ways as well. Take some recent dives of mine at a warmwater destination where the local dive centres catered mainly for a busy clientele of weekend tourist divers.
I was diving with my family, so was not looking for anything too strenuous or technically challenging. We also wanted to get a standard experience rather than special treatment.
Nevertheless, I was surprised at how over-organised it all was. A typical dive would put us into the water in groups of a dozen or more. There would be a rapid fin along a shallow wall followed, perhaps, by an ascent via a swim-through. As we exited the arching rock, a picture of each diver would be taken for purchase after the dive. Sometimes there would be a videographer on hand as well.
It would be all over in less than 10 minutes, after which we were left paddling around the anchorline waiting to surface. This bit would have been fine had the underwater landscape been more interesting, and had there not been so many of us disturbing what there was in the way of wildlife.
I was struck by how the planning reduced such dives to a couple of limited objectives.
For my fellow-divers, the value of these excursions was presumably to increase their qualifying dives, to get their logbooks signed - and to take home a photograph or video. But there seemed to be something missing. The experience of the diving was, to my mind, spoiled by over-emphasis on achieving an end-result.
An American artist memorably described his disappointment at not having achieved more in his work. Having previously imagined himself taking part in a journey into undiscovered imaginative territories, he realised that he had been left behind, doing no more than "keeping the inventory".
While no-one would liken even the most adventurous sport diving to the Missouri voyages of Lewis & Clark, happiness in diving is more than a ticked list. If the process of going diving becomes too goal-oriented, it can lose a lot of its sparkle.
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