What happens when the people we rely on most to provide good role models for new divers drop the ball? That’s easy. The divers get bad information and, as a result, make poor decisions. This is why being a role model is so important.
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Go to Google Images. Search for Neutral Buoyancy. Along with images of the NASA Neutral Buoyancy facility and Neutral Buoyancy Turtle, you’ll see a lot of photos like the one on the right. To most divers — and, sadly, most instructors — the so-called Buddha Hover is synonymous with buoyancy control. Unfortunately, as Penn and Teller would say, it’s total bullshit. And here are seven reasons why.
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Ten years ago, my entry-level students were required, by their training agency, to answer a test question having to do with responses to out-of-air emergencies. Students not only had to correctly identify five different possible responses, but rank them in order of desirability (yeah…like they are actually going to remember all that five years from now). Ironically, the best possible response to any out-of-air emergency wasn’t among the choices. That response? Not running out of gas in the first place.
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I saw trouble coming in advance. What I didn’t foresee, however, was that the diver in question would refuse my attempts to prevent a problem from happening. And the reason why stemmed from how he had been taught.
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Someone recently characterized diver training as 50 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress. That’s pretty much on the money. Dive instructors, as a group, often resist change, as it’s simply easier to keep doing things the same way they always have. Training agencies can be every bit as bad, as modernizing their training materials may mean having to reprint all those expensive textbooks.
If you share our passion for creating better, more environmentally responsible divers and for making buoyancy control a habit and not a “skill,” then you probably wouldn’t mind having a few memes you can post on Facebook so that you can share these sentiments with your fellow divers and instructors. Well, we just made it easy for you.
Those of us who teach scuba know all about That Student. You know the one. He or she is a likable person, and it’s clear this person really wants to dive. Overall, his or her skills aren’t absolutely horrible. But there is that one skill (as often as not it’s mask clearing) which has this person absolutely stymied.
There is an instructor practice that we’ve all seen but I don’t think any of us has actually commented on it. The practice is using the bottom (pool, sea, training platform in quarry or lake) as a training assistant. This is actually the basis for exercises such as fin pivots and other exercises that do not teach proper buoyancy control. This practice is widespread and entrenched in teaching exercises starting at Introduction to Scuba on up.
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If you think modern diver training really is all that modern because we now have eLearning or no longer teach dive tables, think again.
Other than taking a lot less time, diver training has not changed significantly in the nearly four decades that I’ve been doing it. And, as a consequence, beginning divers are not much better today than they were in the 1970s. In many respects, they’re worse.
Most dive instructors (and their training agencies) will tell you it’s unrealistic to expect beginning divers to master much in the way of buoyancy control. That, in order to achieve even a modest degree of control over buoyancy, students really need to enroll in a Buoyancy Control Specialty Diver course immediately upon certification. We’re here to tell you that’s bullshit.