Validation feels nice, doesn't it? Someone pats you on the head, gives you a cookie, and tells you how clever and good-looking you are. Approval, especially when it comes from an authority figure, must tap deeply enough into some evolutionary function of our sociology to make us strive for it as much as any of our other base needs (sex, ice cream, and free wifi). We get a little bump of endorphin with every Facebook like, we blush when someone compliments our looks, and divers just LOVE to get themselves a new C-card.
In the earliest days of diving earning your certification was enough. We've all got that one friend that has stories of their NAUI certification in 1970 that include complete gear removal at 180 feet and at least five deliberate drownings. People who were certified then really WANTED it. Not long after that, though, the agencies pulled in some people who knew about educational theory. These kind-hearted souls explained that simply yelling at people and tying all their equipment into knots isn't going to most efficiently educate future divers. They started to implement the principles of positive feedback.
You can always spot a PADI instructor. They're the ones who high-five or shake the hand of anyone underwater who does fucking anything that prevents their own suicide. They're trained to do that. PADI is the leader in tapping into the validation that makes people feel so warm and fuzzy. I am not agency bashing here at all; it works… after a manner. People learn… mostly. And often they get excited to progress… now, this is where we run into a problem.
Worked into every instructor training program is the importance of pushing continuing education. I don't know whether it started this way (I like to doubt it) but that emphasis tends to be to the shop’s benefit. This is not a bad thing in and of itself; the shop is a business and the truth is getting divers back to take more classes, learn more, buy gear, and generally keep diving is valuable all around. However, pushing classes in such a way that people feel qualified by each to a level of expertise in each facet of the sport empowers them to take one after another after another without any diving in between.
Regularly we encounter Advanced Open Water divers with exactly 9 dives in their logbook. And there is nothing advanced about that. Worse, how often have you seen a logbook of a Divemaster with exactly 60 dives? At 60 dives one should be just about qualified to advise someone on a snorkel purchase. Maybe. If they've really been paying attention.
These are folks who have fallen victim to the aggressive marketing pitch that once you have taken class A you are ready for class B. B qualifies you for C. Then D. And so on.
I have carried instructor cards for four different recreational certifying agencies. Never in any of my instructor training was the message to divers to simply go out and dive a lot stressed. (Well, no, I take that back, I had a few good mentors who went “off-book” and stressed it, and I am grateful for it and absorbed the theory enough to be ranting about it now.). “Con-ed” was the push. Continuing education. Get them back for the next class!
I have to admit, that the business model works. Drug dealers have been proving this since scare-ads from the 80s. A little taste today, then they get you on the comeback. By the time someone has bought a BC and enrolled in Underwater Navigation you've got your hooks in deep and you can sell them any manner of dumb flashlight lanyard.
Our stage is set.
Here we see a pool of divers who are now trained that to learn how to dive you take classes and get lauded by your instructor with things like, “Wow! Your buoyancy control is really spot on!” and “This is a few feet deeper than we should really go, but you’re so rock solid it won't hurt to go to 72 feet for just a minute. We're going to put 70 feet in our logbooks though,” they playfully joke, bringing you, the diver, in on the joke.
(NOTE: They are not bringing you in on the joke. They are covering their own ass to make it seem like they stayed within standards if this dive ever shows up in a deposition.)
Foundations are important. And they're hard to shift under a structure once laid. In this case our foundation is, at its very simplest:
To learn you take more classes. As soon as you pass the class, you are certified to do those level dives for life.
This is flawed logic. Fatally flawed.
I recently read in THIS article an interesting idea, paraphrased as:
Experience = Dive Numbers + Demonstrated Proficiency + Time in Sub-Discipline
It's that last component I've been thinking about the most. Time. Seems overly devalued in the dive world right now. Everyone wants a rebreather and a scooter and to get to the end of the line or the engine room or the bottom of the pinnacle or whatever. And they want to go now! This season! Doesn't matter that they only got their AOW only last year. They've just met the course prerequisites, their instructor high-fives them and told them how awesome they are. Obviously they're super bad-ass now and they're ready, right?
Folks have been trained to believe that certification equals qualification. That belief is built on a foundation laid in their OW class, buttressed by every ad in every dive magazine, and mortared by the validation of every diver in their community who says how awesome they are. This, now, rock solid foundation is what they carry over to their advanced level training, whether this is professional level, technical level, or both.
These divers don't have the patience for the called dives and the blow-outs and the equipment failures and the horrible instabuddies and the million other reasons that a dive gets scrapped over hard-won years of work towards expertise where you learn more than you think you are learning.
It isn't enough to just pass the class. It's not enough to just squeak by the prerequisites. You need to get your ass kicked sometimes.
When the only challenges you have faced have been in a benign, controlled setting under the direct supervision of an instructor (who may or may not even know what the hell they’re doing, or may be an excellent instructor who is having an off day and not be paying attention just now) then how can you trust you will respond to an actual emergency in the real underwater world? Often it's what you don't even know you don't know, the unknown-unknowns, which are going to lash the fastest and the most dangerously.
Without slowly pushing your boundaries over many dives and many hours how do you know you have safely expanded them? Or perhaps you have just wandered haplessly into the dangerous, haunted forest full of goblins and werewolves and simply, luckily, escaped their notice? How long do you expect that luck to hold out?
Certification does not equal qualification.
I have, by some measures, all the certifications one can. I have CCR cave and trimix. That's just about it, the golden tickets. I am also a technical dive instructor. Yeah, I'm pretty proud of that; it's pretty cool. By profession I am a Dive Safety Officer, I spend my days running through every scenario I can think of about stuff that could go wrong underwater and try to design preventative or recovery measures.
None of those things automatically qualify me for every dive on the planet. Many dives, yes, but mostly because AFTER I earned those certifications I spent a LOT of time diving on the bunny-slope version of each level. Even now I'm on a new bunny slope trying to take my time and push, slowly, a little closer to some of my ultimate destinations. And I enjoy it!
Would I like to be doing the highest level exploration dives on earth and be told I'm just a special, little snowflake who is clever and handsome and interesting? Of course I would! But in the meantime I'm going to do some cool stuff and enjoy myself listening to people who are way better than I am and getting as much advice from them as I possibly can.
I suppose all I mean to say is: don't believe the hype.
Just go diving.
