My First Experience Teaching Scuba--The Beach Dive

The graduation dive took place at Hendry's Beach near Santa Barbara. The weather reruns from the previous day.  I suspect we will have the same tomorrow. The beach offers all the attributes for a great dive, lots of parking, an area for gearing up, easy access to the water, a decent rock reef with kelp close to shore, freshwater showers, and a good restaurant for the apres-dive debriefing. It also offers a beach break large enough to show students how to do surf entries and exits but not so large as to knock them down in the process.

Fins on and shuffling backwards, we enter the water in a line. Ed takes one end of the line and I take the other. We act as choreographers for what looks like a line of drunken sea lions doing the cancan. Only Dave, who carries the dive flag, float, and anchor, is excused from the dance. I think if I started doing the conga, all would follow my lead. The line breaks as students stop and brace for the two-foot wave that comes in. At chest-deep water, we roll over and kick out. At this point, I play border collie, working to keep buddy pairs together and the pairs together as a group, reminding divers that the slower swimmer sets the pace for the team.

We drop down into 25 feet of water on the edge of the reef. I stay on the bottom while Ed brings the divers down one-buddy-pair-at a time. Visibility, a spotty 20 feet, gets driven lower if the students begin to thrash around. These kids are pretty good. Ed goes down the line doing final skill checks with each student--mask removal and replacement, regulator removal and recovery and so on. I'm an outrider, swimming back and forth in the event that anyone needs assistance. After the checks, we break into two groups. I show the divers how to use sand ripples for navigation. We see many crabs and kelp bass. We even get checked out by a bat ray, who undoubtedly came by to apologize for being absent from Bat Ray Cove the day before.

The dive ends uneventfully. We hold our dive debriefing. We pose for the obligatory after-dive photos. Today's dive will be number 47 in my log book. I was certified as a basic diver one year ago to the day.

Dave hosts a graduation BBQ at his apartment that night.

He pulls me aside and asks, "who's this guy Mike Nelson that you guys keep talking about? Was he a student of Ed's who had really screwed up?"

I mention that Lloyd Bridges played super diver Mike Nelson in the TV show Sea Hunt.  “Every week, for four seasons, Mike would get into some situation underwater that only his skill could overcome.”

“When was that on TV?” Dave asks.

Just then I knew that there was a generation gap, even though I was only nine years older than the person asking the question.  I had seen Sea Hunt in reruns on after school afternoon TV. 

Teaching scuba is a lot like love affairs. They come and go, they last a short period of time (but what a wonderful time), and while you may forget faces and names of the participants after a few dozen, you will always remember most the details about your first, even though it was the most awkward. So it is with mine. So it is with mine.

The saying, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a small step," appropriately describes my life path that began in that instant. Over next decade-and-a-half, I helped as an assistant instructor/divemaster in dozens of scuba diver certification courses. At times this underwater activity has been a hobby, a vocation, a job, and an obsession. I have met a lot of interesting people along the way and it’s been a lot of fun. I've also met a fair number of people for whom diving was a bucket list activity; they never went diving again.  But that's another story.

One of the divers in this story, Dave, went on to become a very good friend and an excellent dive buddy. We took the UCSB dive club trip over to Catalina for a weekend that is still talked about. He became an assistant instructor and went on to teach one season at the Club Med in Playa Blanca, Mexico. I visited him for a week at the Club. When I walked in, Dave and the Chief of Scuba asked if I would be interested in staying for two weeks and teaching scuba, since they were unexpectedly short-staffed at the end of the season. Despite the tempting offer, I could not accept since I had an obligation to get back to in the states. I did work as a dive guide for that week on the morning dives, which allowed the regular dive staff a little relief time. When I flew out at the end of the week, Ed flew in to finish out the one week left in the season.