Friday, April 19, 2024

My First Experience Teaching Scuba--The Boat Dives

Me on the boat
The honor of breaking me into the rewarding career of assistant scuba instructor fell to Ed Stetson, a diver and waterman without equal. Ed taught an assistant instructor certification course to several proto-instructors just a few weeks before. When he put out a call for volunteers to help assist a class offered through the Outdoor Recreation program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I immediately volunteered.  It was the same arrangement that certified me as a basic scuba diver one year earlier.

Dive classes are divided into three parts--classroom instruction, pool skills training, and open water dives. The class took advantage of all the facilities a university has to offer, a good classroom, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and in the case of UCSB, the Santa Barbara Channel for open water dives. Ten students enrolled for the four-week-long class. During the swim test, we discovered that while ability varied, they were all competent swimmers. Some would swim like dolphins, the others just kind of paddled along. None swam like an anchor, for which we silently thanked Poseidon.

Students did not comprise the entire group.  A mother-daughter pair enrolled in the course.  Joy, the daughter, worked on campus.  Gladys, her mom, was doing the course because she thought it would be fun.  She was the trouper in the class and became something of a “den mother” to the group.  She was adventurous and very well-traveled, striking out on all kinds of treks around the globe.  She told me that she went solo on many of these travels because her retired Air Force husband just did not want to leave Santa Barbara after so many overseas assignments during his career.  One of the youngsters told me after the class “when you see Gladys going through the drill without complaint, you just kind of suck it up and do it.”

The group of ten soon coalesced into a class. We rotated buddies throughout the pool skills sessions. The class met two nights a week, with each evening session split evenly between classroom and pool skills.  The classroom exercises covered essential knowledge in a typical lecture format.  To emphasize a point, Ed would occasionally make reference to a hypothetical diver who thought he knew everything as "a real Mike Nelson.”

The first pool session consisted of showing the students how to hook up the scuba gear and then monitoring as each worked with a buddy to assemble their rig, practicing various entries and surface dives, swimming with the equipment and essential skills.  We watched to make sure that each diver adjusted the equipment properly and did each skill correctly. We emphasized the importance of working as a buddy pair.  We also made sure that each diver was paired with a different buddy for each session.

Confident of their abilities, the class was ready for the scheduled open water dives at Anacapa Island for July 26 and a beach dive for July 27--one year to the day that I was certified as a basic diver.

You may know the typical July Southern California weather pattern--low clouds and fog, with partial clearing along the coast in mid-afternoon. (In fact, people speculate that one reason our TV weather personalities are such clowns is that they have to be entertaining since the weather seldom varies.) We boarded the M/V Captain Midnight owned by Jerry Shapiro, attorney-turned-dive-boat-owner, and skippered by Capt. Don MacIntyre, from whom I learned a great deal about reading the moods of the sea. The crossing from Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard to Anacapa Island went very smoothly, the seas behaved with little swell.

First Dive--Bat Ray Cove

The appropriately named "Bat Ray Cove," scene of our first dive, did not live up to its billing on this day, at least for my team. Ed asked me to take four students on a tour. Jurgen was an exchange student from Germany. Bruce graduated a few weeks earlier and spent the summer tying up some loose ends in his academic record before moving on. Dave, in his third year of Pre-law wanted to learn to dive so he stayed around for the summer session. Bill, a temporary refugee from urban Los Angeles, came to UCSB for summer school to escape USC.

My group for the first dive


When we got to the site, Ed gave the class an overview on conditions and the purpose of the dive.  After the briefing, we told everyone that they could gear up, cautioning them to don their gear from their station.  We asked that they not to spread gear all over the deck as it not only constituted a tripping hazard, but inevitably someone’s gear always came up missing from a pile.  Luckily, the boat did not rock much at anchor.  Gearing up on a pitching deck can present a real challenge for student divers.

Gearing up


After carefully checking each student's gear at the gate, we entered the water one at a time, faced the divemaster and gave the "OK" sign. We dropped down the anchor line and began our underwater tour. The marine life cooperated; we examined sea hares, identified scallops and the plentiful abalone, and tried to play tag with an octopus that really didn't want to be "it." The twenty-five-foot visibility made the dive seem effortless, the group stayed together. We surfaced near the stern of the boat, climbed aboard the swim stair, shed our fins, and boarded the boat. I learned working with later classes things do not always go so well.

Second Dive--Barracuda Rock

After recovering all the divers, and taking roll call to make sure, we moved the boat to Barracuda Rock. This time the location lived up to its billing. My team consisted of the same four divers with the addition of Mattius, another German student. I check each diver's repetitive group computation. We visited a nearby underwater arch, but had to cut the excursion short when the first diver with 750 psi of pressure signaled "low-on-air." We stay longer, 30 minutes, and go a bit deeper, 30 feet, on this dive. On the way to the surface, we spotted the silver torpedo-like silhouette of a barracuda. On the surface, we practiced the kelp crawl--a necessary skill to learn.

If you dive in California, you will eventually find that a rather large kelp bed positioned itself between you and the boat or the beach during your dive. Also, for some unexplained reason, you will not have enough air left in the tank to drop down and swim through the kelp. If you can't go under the canopy, and can't go around it, you have to go through it. The boat will not come and pick you up. California divers relish telling horror stories about how "man-eating" kelp drowns unsuspecting divers when they become entangled in the algae, akin to the Sargasso Sea trapping ships. My own optometrist related how he quit diving after finding the body of a diver wound into the kelp at Catalina. Don't believe it! To listen to these stories, one would conclude that the kelp beds are littered with bodies and that more divers are attacked by the kelp than are certified in any single year! Crawling through kelp can be a pain-in-the-ass, but if done correctly is a mere nuisance. The secret is not to panic, keep air in the BC, pass over it, and next time plan your dive a little bit better!

Dennis and the barracuda
When we got back to the boat, I mentioned to Dennis Divins, the UCSB Diving Officer, that we saw barracuda. He grabs a spear gun and hops into the water. Next thing I know, he comes back with a fine specimen for the evening's dinner.

Third Dive--Barracuda Rock

We don't move the boat for the third and final dive of the day. On this dive, I show two divers around the area. Both divers adapt well to the ocean, but the look in the eyes of one of the divers makes me a little more cautious on this dive. Despite the OK sign, I see in one of the divers the onset of wide-eye apprehension. I do what my training tells me to do, I stop the tour, evaluate the situation, and decide on a course of action, which means getting the diver to the surface. The situation did not turn into limb-thrashing panic nor was it likely that it would have. I still have a conservative approach whenever I work with new divers.



We again took roll-call. In the decade that I worked as a dive master, I always had an irrational fear of leaving someone behind. Can you imagine coming to the surface only to see the boat sailing away? Can you imagine getting a call from the Coast Guard as your boat pulls into the slip inquiring about the one you left behind? 

I always insisted on positive verification that all the divers were indeed back onboard before we pulled the hook and headed for the barn. That habit started on this trip and has served me (and my divers) well. Not only have my boats always returned to shore with the same number of divers, they were same divers who got on board the boat that morning.

No comments:

Post a Comment