DIVE LOG DECEMBER 25 ISSUE 415

Recently, I was consulting for a hotel chain that was looking for a local operator to run their on-site dive centre. One applicant, a very well-known company with many branches, invited me and one of the client’s directors to go diving with their flagship dive centre to impress us. The director was a new-ish diver with sixty logged dives, but he didn’t have his own gear. “No problem,” said the operator”, you can use ours”. All the equipment they lent him was shabby, but it was the fins that particularly caught our attention. Where the foot pocket joined the blade there was a wear line and you could easily bend the blades up and down beyond 90 degrees, so, in the water, the fins just flapped around uselessly. I noticed that the director did not have a dive computer so asked if the dive centre could lend him one, but the shop staff said they did not have rental computers. Anyway, they added, the director had no need of a computer because his guide had one. Needless to say, this operator did not get the job. A friend once told me that, for her first pool session with a very large and successful dive centre in the Caribbean, she was not offered a wetsuit and ended the day with knee and elbow scrapes. She also had chafing marks from her BCD, which was so ill-fitting that the shoulder straps floated above her head on the surface. That night, she was close to quitting the course, but her husband, an experienced diver, persuaded her to persevere. The next day, again in the pool, my friend found that the depth gauge on her console wasn’t functioning. When she pointed this out to the instructor and asked if she could switch it for a gauge that worked properly, he just said, “It doesn’t matter, we are in a pool; we know how deep it is.” That was the final straw for her and her husband. They found another shop and instructor, and she is now a certified and capable new diver. But she is an exception. We rarely get a second opportunity to recruit someone to the sport after we mess it up the

first time.

These stories, sadly all true, are instances of negative marketing, and I am afraid they represent merely the tip of an iceberg of indifference and absence of care in sport diving. The way to improve as an industry and deal with the existential challenges we face is to correct our systemic faults and rid ourselves of incompetent and indolent individuals and operations. This may sound harsh, but that’s the way it is. *** Book cover image of Technically Speaking: Talks on Technical Diving Volume 2: Foundations and Strategies

Simon Pridmore is the author of Technically Speaking, a short series of books on Technical Diving, the second of which has just been published.

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DIVE LOG Australasia #415 December‘ 25

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