Scuba Diving is a very exciting and rewarding sport. If taught properly it can provide years of adventure and new experiences. However, it can be very dangerous if safety and rescue skills are not fully understood.
Every year there are only a handful of deaths of people scuba diving. The details of the incidents always show that most could be avoided if the divers had known better what to do - or not to do. Sub Aqua teaching by the leading training bodies such as BSAC, PADI and many more is of a superlative standard. This includes the superb level of training of instructors who in turn must teach the novices. The trouble is that a few training agencies do not insist on such high levels of safety and even some of the best can occasionally miss the underperformace of one or two of their instructors.
The time when a new recruit first starts learning to dive is the best occasion for lecturing the safety ethos. A new and open mind is more ready to soak up the safety culture than a seasoned diver who probably taught himself to dive years ago.
Every lesson will begin with a briefing, whether it is a dry practical lesson on land, the first sheltered water session probably in a swimming pool or an open water training session in the sea. At the start of the briefing are the safety issues relevant to that lesson and to the site being used. When learning to remove a regulator underwater it may seem obvious but a student is warned to hold their breath for a short while until it is replaced! Safety briefings may seem somewhat pedantic at times but they do help.
One of the key elements of teaching a practical skill to a new student, such as removing and replacing a face mask while underwater or donating a regulator to a buddy in an out of air situation, is to break down the skill into small bite sized parts that can be individually understood easily before putting them together for the complete procedure. Each part of the skill must be taught in a way that it is safe to execute. If you commence with little bits and build up this can be achieved much more easily.
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Mark Jenner is a British Sub Aqua Club dive leader and open water diving instructor. He has dived abroad a number of times and enjoys writing about his scuba diving experiences.
