Wonderful what a glimpse of nubile European flesh does for a bloke! CONFESSIONS OF A DIVING INSTRUCTOR

Novice divers do the oddest things and get into bizarre situations, but so, less excusably, do those who should know better - their instructors. Dave Gwyer went looking to see if any of them wanted to bare their souls

FISH FREEDOM FIGHTER FLAUNTS FLEMISH FEMALE FLESH
Trashing the fish traps that littered the marine reserve in Aqaba gave PADI Assistant Instructor Paul Murray a sense of purpose over and above guiding clients. The traps were simple chicken-wire boxes with a lobster-pot-type entrance. "All I did was snip and trash the trap with a strong pair of scissors and release the fish," says Paul.
"One afternoon, my Belgian group swam off in all directions, so with no guiding responsibilities I went off happily on my own. I soon found a trap with six or seven big, beautiful fish, plus a lovely octopus." There was no one in sight on the surface, so Paul set to with the scissors and smiled to himself as the fish squirmed out to freedom.
Then an ominous shadow passed along the seabed, and he looked up to see the hull of a small boat hovering above him. "The boat followed me everywhere for a good 20 minutes. I'd heard that these guys try to hoist up naughty divers with the hooks they use to retrieve their traps, and I didn't fancy an uncontrolled fast ascent on the end of a fishing line. So I spent most of my return to the beach swimming on my back, clutching my trusty Diver subscription knife and looking out for dangling hooks coming after me."
On the deserted beach the two fishermen were already waiting for Paul, and were clearly angry. A loud argument ensued. "I didn't understood what they were saying, though by the way they were brandishing their trashed fish trap it was fairly obvious. I was terrified, big-time, because it was clearly about to get physical.
"Just then - thank you God - my Belgians emerged from their dive. I saw my chance. I headed straight for the lady divers, helped them dekit and, rather cleverly, I thought, made sure they desuited down to their bikinis, in full view of these local guys."
Still excited, although in a very different way, it seems that the fishermen forgot all about Paul: "Wonderful what a glimpse of nubile European flesh does for a bloke!"
Later the brave eco-warrior allowed the girls to buy their guide a cheap vegetarian dinner. "Well, there's no point risking your life for the fishes by day and then eating them in the evening!"

TWO MEN, ONE SET OF KIT
Confessions to sins of the past are necessary to purge the conscience - not to mention pre-empting the blackmailing efforts of sanctimonious peers, says BSAC Instructor Roy Smallpage.
It was September, and Roy and his novice charge had arrived at the mist-shrouded but table-flat waters of Stoney Cove in Leicestershire just before 9am in the hope of being first in the water - which tells readers who know Stoney Cove just how long ago this was!
"We were supposed to collect a club cylinder from its test before we dived, but we couldn't because it turned out to have failed. It was turning into a hot, sunny day, but now we were faced with either driving all the way home - or doing what we did."
Flug, the novice, was entrusted with the single set of kit while Roy crept along the wooden gantry beneath the Cove Inn, trying to look like an innocent snorkel diver. Flug had been briefed to go over to the same gantry two minutes later, and to keep looking back to the nearby empty car park as though waiting for his buddy to join him.
"To the trained diver this might all have looked a little suspicious, and our antics might well have been challenged but for our superb dive planning. I'm sure that when the BSAC said 'plan your dive - dive your plan', it didn't expect it to be observed with such ruthless, military-type efficiency."
The car park was filling up rapidly. Flug waited until no one was looking, then casually dropped into the water and waited on the submerged platform a couple of metres down. "I then performed a neat snorkeller's duck dive and didn't return to the surface for another 43 minutes," says Roy.
"The two of us finned around the 5m plateau, spending much time around the plane section. We took it in turns to go in and explore the wreck while the other person either used our one set of diving equipment or breathed off the ABLJ (go and ask your Dad!) waiting for his buddy to return."
Roy admits that such behaviour is not to be condoned, but pleads mitigating circumstances. "To illustrate the level of confidence my buddy achieved on that dive, it has to be said that only a week before this dive he had actually managed to turn off the main valve of one diver, as well as ripping off the face masks of two others more qualified than he was. But that's another story..."

Martin Sampson Initiative at a low ebb
You expect certain standards of instructors, and it can be a shock when they are clearly out of their depth, as BSAC National Instructor Martin Sampson, who runs Anglesey Diver Training College, can testify.
"We had a guy come to the school from Birmingham with a party of students for a weekend's PADI Open Water training," he says. "I don't expect instructors to have detailed local knowledge of dive sites, but I do at least expect them to get a weather forecast and seek local advice before setting off."
On the Saturday morning a westerly Force 8 was blowing and the instructor in question appeared through the shop door, followed by the wind and horizontal rain. His conversation with Martin went something like this:
"Where can I dive today?"
"In this weather! What do you want to do?"
"I've got six Open Water students for their first sea dives"
"The only place you'll find flat water will be in Holyhead Harbour, but the viz will be non-existent because of the gales."
"What will I do?"
"Perhaps you can practise some surface drills - rescues or something."
"But that's not in their course."
"Well, Holyhead is the only place with no waves in this weather."
Our intrepid instructor left, but 45 minutes later he burst through the door, water still dripping from his drysuit:
"The water's gone!" he wailed.
"What do you mean?"
"There's no water!"
"Eh?"
"THERE IS NO WATER! Just mud and weed and..."
At this point Martin looked at his watch and replied: "Well, it is low water."
"Eh?"
"You know, low water. Low tide."
"Eh?"
Martin reached for the tide tables, took a deep breath and tried to explain: "Low water. Look, the tide rises and falls, according to the tide tables, by about 5.5 metres today. So right now, it's low water."
"But what am I going to do?" wailed his visitor again.
At this point Martin had a sense of humour failure and retorted: "You're the 'professional' instructor, you work it out. It's not quite the same as Stoney Cove, is it?"
The moral is that paying an instructor does not automatically make him or her professional. "It's one thing I can't abide," says Martin, "amateurish professional instructors!"

COME HERE, YOU'LL DO
Keeping trainees under control can be hard work. PADI staff instructor Mark Overington from Hertford had a memorable wreck dive with six of them at Portland.
"I had six students and two divemasters and we went down on the Countess of Erne," he says. "We took them down the line, got everybody settled, and wallop, we had a starburst! All six of the students suddenly went off in different directions.
"We quickly rounded up four of them, but we couldn't find the other two. I saw bubbles in the distance so I swam after them, grabbed these two divers and pulled them all the way down. They were kicking and struggling, really going mental, but I got them in line - and suddenly realised they weren't my students!"
Mark let his captives go and found his own trainees halfway up the boat, hugging a funnel. "I was very relieved, because if any students leave the pack, you can't be more nervous. It seemed forever before we found them, but it was probably only a few minutes. These lads had been well trained and were doing their safety drills and preparing to make an ascent, but we got them back in the group and carried on diving."
He saw the other divers later in Portland. "I couldn't do enough apologising, but they thought it was funny."

Richard Wigley TRUST ME, I'M A DIVER SUPERVISOR
Training new divers can lead to embarrassing moments, particularly if your students know more about a subject than you do. Sub-Aqua Association Diver Supervisor Richard Wigley has something to say about that:
"We had a couple join the club," he says. "They'd done a bit of training and I was given the job of seeing what they knew. They were doing OK, but when it came to the life-saving and CPR, they were not doing it to the right standard.
"I kept making them do the exercise over and over again, because they didn't do it our way. I just kept saying to them: 'What you are doing is OK, but it isn't up to our standard."
They all met in the bar afterwards and had a chat. That was when one of the pair dropped into the conversation that they were a doctor and nurse who worked in an accident & emergency department.
"I thought: 'Oh hell!' I just wished the ground would open up and swallow me," says Richard.

Steve Fern RED-FACED AND GASPING
Teaching novices even the easiest techniques can lead to some excruciatingly embarrassing moments for diving instructors - just ask PADI Master Diver Steve Fern.
He was in a pool with some newcomers, teaching them the technique called "snorkel blast and clear". It's a simple enough exercise, where you dip your head under water, flood your snorkel, tilt your head upright and blast the water out. Easy.
The bright-eyed students knelt in the pool, waiting for the maestro to demonstrate, so Steve took a breath, dipped his head underwater, raised his head to blast the water clear, took another breath and - aaargh - suddenly realised he was too deep. His snorkel was still below the surface and he nearly choked on a gobful of water.
"I tried the blast but the snorkel was still under water," he says. "I decided to try to bluff it out as long as I could while the students had a go."
Steve was wondering how long he could hold his breath, but realised he had been rumbled when he spotted several of his charges sniggering.
"It was so embarrassing," he admits. "At the end I had to just laugh and move everybody to a shallower area. If you dive long enough, you do stupid things."

THINGS BEST DONE ELSEWHERE
Nigel Preece, BSAC Regional Coaching & Development Manager, Middle East, reckons instructors should be trained to expect the unexpected.
"A couple of years ago I signed up a Dive Leader and my final piece of advice was: 'Don't ever take anything for granted when it comes to a new diver on their first open-water dive. Be ready for anything.'"
Two weeks later the Dive Leader approached Nigel and asked him if he remembered his final comment to her. Why? he asked.
It turned out that she had taken a new diver on his first open-water dive. "On the bottom the diver signalled to her that he needed some more weight. Our new Dive Leader had a spare 2kg weight in her BC pocket. She took it out and held it up so that the novice diver could see it, prior to her putting it on his belt or in his BC pocket.
"But as she produced the weight, her newbie helpfully took off his weightbelt and handed it to her so that she could thread the weight on!"
She only just managed to grab his fins, drag him down to the bottom and sit astride him so that she could refasten his weightbelt!

THE SURFACE-COVER LOVERS
Sometimes diving isn't the only thing people get up to using RIBs. Picture the scene: Instructor Jim, the club stud, is diving with Jane, the club babe, and four others off the south coast of England.
Jim and Jane have been enjoying a sizzling affair. It was a flat calm day, the four other divers were under water and it was burning hot. Jim decided to strip off his drysuit, which was when things started to get a bit steamy.
Jim explains: "Suddenly I felt really horny, and I said to her: 'We'll have to be quick!' She nodded, so I struck the engine up and moved off the wreck."
Quicker than you can do a backward roll, Jane was out of her drysuit and the pair had embarked on their own vigorous form of buddy checking, over the RIB's console.
But Jim's thoughts were not entirely on Jane: "All the time I was watching the SMBs, and the fear in my mind was that the others would surface while we were on the job. Afterwards, while we were kitting up to go diving, we kept giggling. Everyone was asking what we were laughing at. I used a lot of air on that dive, because my heart was still pounding.
"I was already in the Mile High club, the Mile Out at Sea in a Yacht Club and I always wanted to do it in a dive boat. I was certainly proud of myself - we both thought it was a great achievement. Nobody else knew about it - and I certainly didn't brag about it."
Well, that's not quite true. Diver did track down one of the other buddy pairs on that dive. They claim that they surfaced, saw what was going on and dropped down a couple of metres because they didn't want to interrupt!

Ian Fuller THE MAN IN BLACK
BSAC Instructor Ian Fuller remembers a time a girl went missing on the wreck of the Hood.
"It was the end of a Sports Diver course on which four students had all qualified. All they lacked was experience, and I was going as back-up on a jolly." Everything went well, and the group had finished their dive and were coming up the line at around 9m when some other divers barged past on their way down to the wreck.
"In the confusion, one of our party mistook one of them for me - and followed them back down!" Back at the surface, Ian realised he was missing a girl. "I quickly got everybody on board, thinking I would have to search the whole length of the Hood. I searched the other side and the surface." Was she there? "No - I knew I 'd have to do the same again.
"I was really worried by now, and another instructor came down with me and soloed around the wreck, while I started going through bits of it. Then I came across a diver in black I had never seen before and, behind him, another, very upset, diver. I thought: 'I've found her, thank Christ!' I looked at him and looked at her, but he just shrugged his shoulders - and she was crying!"
Ian looked at the girl's gauge and saw that she had 50 bar of air left. "So I grabbed her left hand and squeezed it hard before taking her back to the surface. She had thought the guy in black was me, and that was why she followed him! She couldn't understand why nobody was communicating with her!
"This other diver was on his own and his attitude was: 'Who are you?' She actually showed him her gauge, but he didn't respond.
"It's one of the things that can happen on a crowded dive site."

Paul Morley GET THIS FOR A PARTY PIECE!
Trainee divers sometimes have unusual ways of interpreting diving skills. BSAC Advanced Instructor Paul Morley explains:
"I had two novices in a pool. They were both kneeling in front of me, and I did a demonstration of mask-clearing. I looked at the first student and he did it fine; I looked at the second one and he got hold of the mask, stretched the strap and let the mask smack back onto his face.
"His mask was filled with water and his eyes were bulging. Then I noticed that the water level was dropping in his mask, but he didn't appear to be doing anything. It was like watching water going down in a cistern, but I couldn't see any bubbles. He cleared his mask but he had this fixed expression, and I gave the signal to surface.
"I got him to the side of the pool and asked: 'Did you do what I think you did?' and he just grunted. I couldn't believe it. He had snorted the water in his mask up through his nose and blown it out through his reg!"

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE
"Running a busy dive centre, I must have taught just about every type of person, from every walk of life imaginable," says professional instructor Tom Gotterup, who was at one time a marine in Vietnam.
When he was asked to teach members of the local fire service to dive he thought, why not? "Firemen are supposed to have nerves of steel, so I thought this should be easy money."
After the initial training Tom was full of optimism, his students meeting all his expectations.
It came time for their first open-water experience, practising basic skills in no more than 10m. Everybody kitted up, carried out their buddy checks and together made a good, controlled descent to the bottom.
Tom followed the briefing and commenced mask-clearing with one of the students - then there was a tap on his shoulder. "I turned to face another student, who had struck me as regarding himself as particularly tough. He was looking me straight in the eyes and giving me the thumb-and-index-finger OK sign. "I returned the sign, turned and carried on where I had left off."
A few seconds later there came a series of quick taps on his shoulder. "I turned, and again the student gave the same OK signal, though with slightly more emphasis than before. "I thought he needed some further reassurance, so I returned the signal precisely and went back to the mask-clearing."
Suddenly Tom felt his shoulder being shaken violently, and turned to see bulging eyes in a mask and a hand frantically and repeatedly pushing the OK signal in his face. "At once I realised that the student had confused his signals and was in fact out of air! I put my octopus in his mouth and we made a controlled ascent to the surface.
"You got your signals wrong!" Tom told the student when they arrived safely at the top.
"Yes, I know," replied the fireman calmly. "But when I thought I was giving the right signal, I thought you were signalling that you were out of air as well, so I thought, if Tom can damn well stay down here with no air, so can I!"

Stephen Cunningham MIND THE FLASH
Being a diving instructor abroad does have its advantages. PADI Dive Master Stephen Cunningham was working in Marmaris in Turkey: "One of my daily tasks was to take first-time divers for a Discover Scuba session, which involves swimming around in a few metres of water, appreciating the fish and taking photos of the new divers for them to show off to their friends."
One morning, Stephen took a group of four girls into the water for their first taste of scuba diving, and as usual stopped halfway through the dive to take their pictures.
"Without warning, the girls unzipped their wetsuits, unclipped their BCs and flashed their boobs for the camera! I was gobsmacked, but they just took it in their stride. The girls made us promise that we would give them all the copies of the photos but one of the divemasters had duplicates made, and saw to it that everyone on board that day received a copy!"

Do any other instructors have guilty secrets? Want to make a clean breast of it? Contact Diver now!
Appeared in DIVER - August 1999