THE
DIVE GUIDE
FROM HELL
When you're all at sea and your leader's competence is in question, you have to decide how you're going to play it, as Diver's Art Editor Tami Levinson discovered on a live-aboard holiday in the Red Sea recently
Eight strangers, gathered together at the airport by a paunchy young man smoking a cigarette and holding a sign with the name of a boat. It was the start of a one-week live-aboard trip out of Hurghada.
Later we settled into our temporary home, then regrouped. We introduced ourselves, chatted, and speculated on who was to be our guide, about the captain and crew, when we'd be setting sail and so on.
Two hours after our arrival another young man walked onto the boat and apologised for being late. There was a long pause as we waited to hear more.
The silence was eventually broken as I brazenly called out: "And who are you?" As if having his memory jogged, he introduced himself to us. This, it transpired, was our holiday leader and dive guide. He told us what his qualifications were - PADI Dive Master - that we would be setting off early next morning and that he would give us a full briefing then.
That was it. The briefing never came - there was no week-long dive plan. He never introduced the captain or the crew. He didn't ask us our names, and showed no curiosity about our respective levels of skill or qualifications. There were no boat rules, no pointing out where the first-aid kit was, the location of the oxygen - nothing. We waited, then we asked, but received no replies.
When it came to the diving, our guide's practices contravened PADI guidelines in almost every way. On one day he would have us kit up as much as 20 minutes before entry in very hot weather conditions; on another he would rush us into the water with no preamble, leaving divers in an anxious state.
He would jump in after telling us to meet at the anchor line, but not be there when we arrived; he would disappear at various points during the dives, sometimes leaving us to make our own arrangements for the rest of the dive - and this, remember, after no briefing. And he dived without depth gauge, computer or tables.
At Ras Mohammed we had only one dive - very early. We were rushed into the water, after being told that if we left it too long we would be surrounded by up to 200 divers. We had paid $5 each for the dive, supposedly so that this could be passed on to the authorities whose job it is to keep the site in good condition. When we asked if we could do another dive there we were told to pay another $5 each, though we knew the official levy was $5 per day.
Our guide didn't appear to like questions: he clearly felt that they brought into question his judgment and highlighted our lack of trust. When we explained that asking questions and receiving explanations made us feel more secure, his reply was: "Don't worry!"
We did worry. On one particular dive (the one referred to in my log as "defying death") the briefing was so inadequate that he nearly lost - as in losing lives - six divers. Even the most experienced of us should not have been allowed into the water in the prevailing conditions, but when things went wrong he deserted our group and returned to the boat to control operations from there.
If not for the skill of the captain and the level-headedness of those in the water, the boat would have mown us all down under his direction. It was a terrifying experience.
Our group was lucky that day, and lucky throughout in that we all got on wonderfully well. We formed a mutual support group that did not extend to our dive guide. Six of us were experienced, two were beginners. Had there been a higher proportion of inexperienced divers I would hardly have been surprised had serious incidents, even fatalities, occurred.
Now, many of us will have come across this sort of problem before, and to some extent it is of our making. We demand bargain-price diving holidays and to some extent we have to be prepared for the resulting corner-cutting. Ours was not the only hastily trained, under-paid dive guide unable or unwilling to communicate with his charges, in the Red Sea or anywhere else.
Once on a live-aboard you are to some extent committed. In the face of our guide's intransigence we decided to stick together and look out for each other, but that isn't always possible.
What we have to do on any such trip is hope for the best but be prepared for the worst, and also be prepared to stand up for our right to dive safely and comfortably. We also need to be ready to complain when we get back, to make sure that others who follow don't get the same raw deal.
I still don't know whether we did all we could have done in the circumstances, but I've now lodged my complaint with the company through which I booked.
I'm sure no tour operator wants to lose customers - certainly not in the way that grabs newspaper headlines.
Appeared in DIVER - September 1999
