Am I a diver now? -

Am I a diver now?

Article by Mark Powell

I was asked this question a number of years ago by an open water student who had just passed their Open Water Diver course. What would your answer be?

My initial reaction was to hesitate, the word diver is right there in the title. The ISO standards talk about an autonomous diver and the student was now technically certified to dive with someone of equal level. I was confident that they could do this, otherwise I would not have passed him at this level. So why was I hesitating to give him a definitive answer?

The world’s greatest living explorer

To give you some context, the student in question was Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Readers in the UK will be familiar with this name but for those outside the UK, according to the Guinness Book of World Records in 1984, Sir Ranulph is the world’s greatest living explorer. He has written numerous books about his army service and his expeditions as well as books on explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton. He served in the British Army for eight years, including a period in the SAS and on counter-insurgency service while attached to the Army of the Sultanate of Oman. He later undertook numerous expeditions and was the first person to visit both the North Pole and South Pole by surface means and the first to completely cross Antarctica on foot. In May 2009, at the age of 65, he reached the summit of Mount Everest.

I had been asked to teach Sir Ranulph, or Ran as he preferred to be called, an open water course as part of a project he had been invited to take part in. This would have involved working with him over an extended period of time to take him from Open Water through Rescue Diver and eventually onto Rebreather diving. Unfortunately, the project never went ahead but I did spend a fascinating week with him teaching him his open water and dry suit courses and listening to many stories of his expedition and various exploits.

As I considered Ran’s question; “am I a diver now?” he explained the reason for asking the question was that when he had done an initial climbing course in preparation for climbing Everest, he had asked the instructor at the end of the course “am I a climber now?”. The answer had been an emphatic “NO”. His instructor had gone on to explain that he had only done some training and now he had to put all of that into practice, get some real climbing experience and learn all the real-life lessons that were required in order to become a climber.

I realised that the reason I had hesitated in my reply is that this was exactly the reply that I had wanted to give.

Open Water does not make you a diver

Passing an open water course does not make you a diver. It is the start of your journey to becoming a diver. You still need to put that training into practice, get some real diving experience and learn the real-life lessons that are required in order to become a diver.

Practice

There is a well-established concept known as the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, which reveals a startling truth about learning retention: without reinforcement, a student may forget up to 80% of what they were taught within a few days. In fact, within one hour of learning, they may retain only 50% of the material.

If divers only remember 20% of what they are taught, what does this mean for their ability to perform under pressure when they are outside the controlled environment of the course? The answer lies in ongoing practice to ensure they retain skills and knowledge. Repetition and reinforcement are key to retention, and the more we encourage divers to revisit and practice what they’ve learned, the better they will retain and apply those skills.

Use it or Lose It

Skill fade is the gradual decline in proficiency or expertise within a particular skill set due to a lack of regular practice or use. In other words, even if you gain a skill, you will quickly lose that skill if you do not keep up regular practice.

If you have only just learned a skill and have managed to only get to the point where you are barely proficient at it then it will not take much skill fade for your performance to drop to an unacceptable level.

This means that one of the most important lessons an instructor can give their students is the importance of regular practice. With practice you will continue to improve and get better but without practice your skills will gradually fade and you will become less and less able to perform key skills and emergency procedures.

Continuing Education

The open water course is designed to teach you the basic principles of diving. Depending on where you dive or the type of diving you will be doing, there may be a requirement to do additional training. For example, for cold water diving a drysuit course may be required. If you regularly dive from boats then a boat diving course will give you the knowledge and skills you need to perform this type of diving. Nitrox provides several advantages for divers. These are touched on very briefly during your open water course but some additional training is required to take advantage of the benefits of Nitrox. These additional courses will add to the skills you have developed during your open water course but will also give you a chance to practice the basic skills under the supervision of an instructor.

Experience

No matter how good your training was and how much you practice, you also need to have real world experience. Even the most realistic training is not “real,” so you need to put the training into practice in the water. Training situations are often clear and unambiguous, but the real world is not always like that.

If the training environment is different to the real-world environment, then it takes time to apply the training lessons to the real world. Different visibility, cold water vs fresh water, sea vs fresh, currents, entry points, different dive buddies, boats, and local procedures may also add variables they could not practice in training.

When training and practicing, the diver can focus primarily on the activity they are doing without too many distractions. Experience involves using those skills, not in isolation but as part of the whole dive, possibly when you are distracted by other considerations such as environmental challenges, your buddy, or the situation you are in.

“Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.”

Steven Wright

Experience is obtained by putting yourself in different environments. If you do 20 dives at the same location, in the same conditions, that is not really 20 separate dives but rather the same dive repeated 20 times. By exposing yourself to different environments, you encounter different conditions and challenges which may make the activity more, or sometimes less, challenging.

Can you rescue your buddy?

Your open water course stressed the importance of the buddy system. The great advantage of the buddy system is that if you get into trouble your buddy is there to help you. That sounds very reassuring but is it true if you have two open water divers diving together?

Consider your dive buddy; are they really capable of helping you or rescuing you if you get into trouble? Are you confident enough in your abilities that you can look after yourself as well as being available to help your buddy. If they were to get into serious trouble, could you rescue them? It is for this reason that SDI believes that all divers should have the aim of becoming a Rescue Diver. You are not really a diver unless you can rescue your buddy.

“You are not really a diver unless you can rescue your buddy.”

When am I a diver?

Once you have completed your open water course you have taken the first step to becoming a diver, but there is still work to do.

The SDI Advanced Diver programme is designed to give you additional training and, to achieve this level, you have to have 25 logged dives in order to put your skills into practice and start gaining experience.

However, it is not until you are a Rescue Diver that you have proven the ability to rescue your buddy and you can really call yourself a diver.

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