420 Dive Log Australasia OCTOBER 2026

dive shops kept on cutting costs and discounting the cost of dive courses to try to survive. Shop owners compensated by reducing instructor wages. They remained at $100 a day for close to twenty years. Next, they cut the dive course to three days and got rid of a lot of the theory. Toward the end, the daily pay was a few miserable dollars more than the dole. This price war sent a lot of dive shop owners broke and many dive instructors into abject poverty. Dive shops regarded other shops as’the enemy’.What a joke! I knew from running well over one hundred and seventy scuba courses that,once they had mastered skills, the best teacher was time under water, , they could use them in many situations, encounter marine life, develop confidence, self-reliance and mastery. Most important. they could fall in love with diving! They got comfortable, confident and hooked! I charged proper market rate and delivered a high-quality course. The phone did not stop ringing for seven years until general overwork raised its ugly head and my first son was born. By then I had certified close to seven hundred divers whilst working a full-time job, an achievement that I am proud of. I still maintain that instructor candidates should have at least five hundred dives under their belt. It takes time to encounter every aspect of diving and the many experiences lead to invaluable anecdotes to supplement your teaching. Instructors with less than a hundred dives are really unprepared and inexperienced for their job, in my view. I also maintain that instructors should deliver lectures personally and actually teach their divers, not relying on a ‘plastic’ video unrelated to local diving. Much of the bonding, fun and friendship develops in the classroom and students learn a lot more from your experiences. I purchased a Nikonos II in 1978 and then my first U/W housing, a Sea Tite housing made here in Sydney. Within a year, other divers began asking me to run a U/W photo course which I did sometimes. Next, I read all three dive magazines avidly each month. I decided that I had good enough photos and I could write stories. My first published article was night diving on the Great Barrier Reef in 1983 in Neville Coleman’s Underwater. Since then, I have written well over three hundred articles and had more than three thousand photos published in a dozen magazines. I became a regular contributor in Sport Diving, Scuba Diver and Underwater in the mid 80”s, often times having a major feature article in all three magazines simultaneously. Diving has been rewarding for me socially and professionally but not so much economically. (I met my wife of 47 years through diving). Diving is like the ocean food chain. Instructors are like sardines feeding on scraps at the bottom of the food chain whilst bigger hungrier fish come in the form of dive boats, gear manufacturers and dive holidays with first claim on your diving $$, scooping up big bucks. Looking back, it has been a great voyage of adventure and friendship. These days, I continue to try to make a contribution to diving providing a service, making myself useful through promoting diving in Dive Log writing books on Marine Biology, Fish and U/W photography. Dive Log Australasia is a world class diving magazine. It always features excellent educational articles, the best U/W photos and it is Australian made. I always welcome more Australian divers to contribute to Australia’s longest running scuba magazine so it can get even better. The Oct issue of Dive Log is another blockbuster. Read on and enjoy!

October marks a special milestone for me. I leaned to dive in 1976, starting in October. I have been diving actively for fifty years averaging more than 140 dives a year. It slowed down a lot when I had three kids but later on, I made over three hundred dives a year for several years and averaged 265 dives a year for one eleven-year dive-athon. I have seen some changes, learned a great deal and had lots of fun and so many aventures. I was always a Biologist and Naturalist when I was an avid bushwalker pre-diving, learning about nature especially snakes, spiders and mountain flora. I dived head first into marine biology immediately. My first trip to the Great Barrier Reef was a ten day live aboard in 1977 to the Swains and Saumerez reefs way out in the Coral Sea. That is when I learned about scull-duggery at sea. When I embarked onto the boat, I wondered why the captain brought along twenty cabbages. We ate cabbage for every lunch and dinner. It was a lesson in economics; expensive trip with cheap food, max profit for the skipper. He also drunk at least 12 bottles of Bundaberg Rum starting with a rum and coke at 10 a.m. every day. He always had a glass in his hand until midnight. He never fell over once! Somehow, we did make it back home safely. Then, I went on three fortnight Island camping dive trips to Lady Musgrave, Tryon Is and North West Island. These were interspersed with five annual live aboards from Gladstone to the Capricorn Bunker reefs from an hilarious bald witty skipper, John who insulted brutally us at every breath. Naturally, we gave it back to him and nearly died of laughter when he tried to tell us that the brand-new appliance in the dining area was the latest Television. It was the first time we had seen a microwave oven. I christened him the “old buck tooth bowling ball” which shut him up for a few seconds. Anyway, it was so much fun and hilarious exchange of insults between loads of excellent diving. Since, I have done fifty-six scuba diving trips to the Great Barrier reef all the way from Lord Howe to Raine Is. I am a natural educator so I had to enrol in my FAUI assistant Instructor course in 1978 with Bob Baldwin, the then president of FAUI. I did a lot of training with Rick Swansborough at Dive Trek and with Alan Watson, a commercial Dive instructor at Phil Straw’s Cronulla dive. When I did my Instructor exam in 1982, I had rewritten the entire Open Water Course in my own style with prepared lecture notes on every aspect of diving along with handouts, overhead teaching aids and slide shows. The PADI IDC was a breeze for me because I was so well trained and I had run so many dives and lectures that I might have been over prepared, if there is such a thing. My first dive course included nine friends and work mates. In those days, the dive course was five full days of diving, ten hours of night theory and the exam. My dive course always began with a 90 minute snorkel lesson. I made all of the candidates rework all of the exercises until they were confident. I was told that I exceeded standards but I trained divers properly to my personal satisfaction. Some OWD students christened me ‘Iron Mike’ because they told me that I made them drill the exercises over and over like a Sargeant Major. They became safe and knowledgeable divers once certified. Lots of them did the Advanced course. In those days, the advanced course was another ten dives, including night dives and two boat dives with another ten hours of theory, not far short of today’s divemaster in some ways. Most bought their gear from the shop so the owner was happy. I was fortunate to avoid the absolutely disastrous and stupid way scuba diving devolved over the next five to fifteen years. Most OUR COVER PHOTO This wonderful photo of a pufferfish from YAP by David Fleetham is highlighting the excellent reef and night diving in Micronesia.

Happy diving. Mike

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Divelogaustralasia #420 October‘ 26

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