THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT

By Alex Brylske

Recently I saw an ad from a dive center proudly announcing, “Learn to Dive in only three days!” It’s not that big of a deal, given that many dive centers have for years been offering programs to train divers in as little as four days (normally over two weekends). But it got me thinking about how much diving has changed over the years, and whether it’s all been for the good.

To provide some perspective, when I learned to dive — at least when I got around to getting formally certified — training involved three months. Indeed, for 12 solid weeks I had to spend three hours on Sunday mornings in the pool and three hours Wednesday evenings in a classroom. That’s 72 hours, and that’s before I went anywhere near open water.

While the classroom was a challenge, it paled in comparison with the pool training. First, anyone in the class who could not swim a quarter mile without stopping, and swim the length of the pool underwater on one breath, was told to leave. Then it took three weeks of intensive “skin diving” training before we even saw our first scuba tank. Not that tanks were any relief from the sadistic training ritual. For example, our scuba exercises included ample no-mask drills, and an exercise called “station breathing.” In the latter, one fewer tanks than there were students were first arrayed on the pool bottom. Then, wearing only mask and fins, we had to swim from tank to tank giving up the air supply once it was approached by another diver. The culminating pool training exercise was a session beloved by my instructor and his staff called, threateningly enough, “harassment.”

Fast-forward 40 years. Today, students are lucky to receive more than a dozen hours of contact time with their instructor. And, in my view, anything that smacks of challenge has been all but eliminated from the curriculum on the assumption that we don’t want to stress student divers unduly with unnecessary or unrealistic knowledge and skills.

The rationale, of course, has been to make diving more fun and accessible to more people. Perhaps it would be simpler just to issue folks a C-card with their birth certificate and be done with it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those dinosaurs who think diver training has gone to hell in a handbasket. First and foremost, the data on diving accidents just doesn’t support this conclusion. As measured by fatalities, diving is demonstrably safer today than when I started.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that it appears that we haven’t achieved our goal of getting more people into the sport, at least nowhere near the number we had hoped (especially young people). Yet, given that this campaign to make learning to dive easier has been going on for 30 years without success, you’d think we’d start looking elsewhere for a solution.

Now, as a disclaimer, I have to admit that as someone once responsible for the educational programming of the world’s largest diver training program,

To Buddy or Not to Buddy

By Alex Brylske

Photo by Joseph C. Dovala

A funny thing happened to me this past weekend.

I was on a dive charter that included mostly tourists from up north who were escaping the ravages of winter. As is common, some were couples while others were alone. The couples of course had their buddy assignment covered.

The singles were a different matter. So, the divemaster proceeded to assign buddies to those on board who had none. As this is standard operating procedure, I went about my business thinking nothing of it. But my attention was soon drawn to a rather heated discussion between the captain and one of the lone divers.

The diver in question was vehemently refusing to dive with a stranger, insisting that he be allowed to dive solo. (He also apparently produced a card verifying a “solo diver” certification.) The captain would hear none of it and broke off the confrontation with the ultimatum that “you either dive with a buddy or you’re not diving from this boat.” Begrudgingly, the diver agreed.


After the dive, the angry would-be solo diver was more than eager to talk, so I spoke to him about the incident. It turned out that, indeed, he had taken a course in solo diving and said that he rarely ever dived with a buddy. His rationale was, in my view, quite solid and involved two premises. First, he resented having to dive with someone who he believed was less qualified than he was. He saw it as, in his words, “a baby-sitting assignment for which I had to pay.” He went on to cite several examples from past experience where he had to assist less qualified buddies with problems, thus ruining his own dive.