When he's not doing ridiculously deep dives and writing about his experiences, Mark Ellyatt teaches people to dive, or to dive better. But should he be expected to do that job purely for love?
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Dive pro for hire - will work for scraps
WHY DO WORKING DIVING INSTRUCTORS earn less in terms of hourly rates than a street beggar? Why do some dive "professionals" even have to pay to work?
No wonder the industry is on its posterior when so many scuba "would-bes" are groomed to pay now't from the beginning. Free try-dives, government-sponsored diving-instructor courses and retailers cutting each others' throats with online sales - how can we instructors make any cash?
I have attended several fetes and open days around the country recently, and at each one I saw a try-dive pool. They all had something in common. Inexplicably, they were offering their try-dives for free!
Typically these pools were manned, or womanned, by dejected dive pros with blue hands but genuine smiles. Their aim was to entrap embryonic Open Water course customers while attempting to filter out parents looking to lose their children for an hour.
The dive-shop owner would have turned up at dawn's crack with thousands of pounds' worth of kit to fill a hire pool with priceless drinking water, heedless of hosepipe bans.
The staff would have paid the ridiculous insurance premiums that allow them to teach, sold their kidneys to pay training-agency renewal fees, bought personal dive kit replete with a wheelbarrow-load of curly lanyards, and then suffer the indignity of paying for their own air-fills, just to be part of the circus. So why are the customers not being charged?
Next to the diving pool last weekend was a tent complete with shivering birds-of-prey chained next to a bowl for flipping coins in.
Those birds lucky enough to dodge the coppers would then be posed on a grimy kid's arm in exchange for £2, or £4 if you wanted a photo.
The witch-like moneytaker was certainly business-like. She wouldeven ask for extra coins if your camera flash misfired! The try-divers next door were being dragged into a circle and semi-submerged for 20 minutes, either prone as in death or frantically struggling, all bedecked in Italian wetsuits and shiny diving equipment - for free. Bizarre.
Ironically, I can assure you that the queue at the costly bird-lady's tent was far longer than that for the free discover-ze-fishes experience.
Are new divers getting roped in too cheaply - and is it the instructors who are subsidising their training?
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My local dive store is currently considering jumping onto the next debtors'-prison bandwagon by offering "Nitrox for Free". One of its competitors is cleaning up, apparently, as new customers take advantage of it giving its profits away. And all it had to do was invest £20,000 in a shiny-whizzo new pump.
If it had wanted to give nitrox away without selling the farm, why not buy another partial-pressure filling whip, or even blend the stuff first into its existing storage banks. Then it could afford to vent it into the atmosphere, or give it away to homeless people.
A while back I went looking for work in Cairns in Australia, thinking that such a busy place would need an army of career-minded dive professionals to oil the cogs.
One dive centre after another asked me how much I was willing to pay to do a day's work! It seems that so many well-heeled instructors head to this diving Mecca looking for experience-gained-badges rather than money that unscrupulous employers actually get them to pay for the privilege. The best deal I could obtain involved paying my own reef-tax and buying a new company T-shirt every day I worked while completing an Open Water course for the shop!
The centre's owner even showed me how it used the backs of job application letters for photocopying and wallpapering the "dunny", because it received so many every day.
The term "no cost, no value" applies very strongly to diving, and dive pros should take heed.
It may seem a strange concept, but instructors could consider charging for their services, and dive shops could think about selling equipment for more than break-even.
Charging for goods and services might allow us to stay professional for longer than the first year's dive-agency renewal, and even pay for some new diving-themed tattoos.
I have just done an experiment to see what the term "professional" means to other tradesmen. I phoned a local plumber to ask, not for a full Open Water course (a boiler service) but simply for a free try-dive in the form of a tap-washer change.
A curt **** off was followed by a slammed-down phone.
I then contacted my local ski slope, requesting a few hours of free time complete with equipment and guide. For my efforts, I was put on BT's nuisance list!
It's plain to see that the industry is supersaturated with diving pros trying to perfect their own "get poor quick" scheme. I believe we need a three-year instructor-training freeze, to allow those already qualified to recoup enough cash to retrain for another McJob of their dreams, before the industry sinks to the seabed for ever.
"Receiving monetary gains in exchange for services" is how the dictionary defines "professional".
"Works long hours for free in exchange for a badge and 'stificate'" is how I define "diving professional". Want to work for free? Join Unicef.
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