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We often hear that 'experience is the best teacher.' In diving, much like in aviation, it’s common to equate years under the water, or the number of logged dives, with competence. We assume a diver with hundreds of dives is automatically more capable than someone fresh out of training. But what i...
The Hidden Depths of Small Talk You’re sitting on the bench at the dive site, chatting with your buddy before the first dive of the weekend. “Morning mate, sleep well?”“Yeah, not bad. You?” This small talk doesn’t seem like much, a handshake, a nod, a few polite words, but that small talk is d...
Technical diving has a reputation for precision, discipline, and control. This manifests in rigorous gas planning, detailed equipment setup, thorough protocols. It’s easy to believe that once you’ve trained hard enough or bought the right kit, you can engineer risk out of the dive. However, bene...
Are all technical divers leaders? Leadership is one of the topics that we explore in the Human Factors in Diving: Applied Skills class, and the statement that “all instructors are leaders” often generates spirited discussion. The fact that as a diving instructor you are also a leader seems to be ...
I still have a very vivid memory from a tech diving class I took, even though it was almost 3 years ago. There were 3 students on the class plus an instructor and the memory in question involved me doing an emergency drill. From the plan and brief I knew that the drill was going to happen and I k...
Story 1: Two cave/tech divers mislabelled each other’s stage cylinders the night before the dive. Because of distraction, back-to-back analysing and labelling, the bottle marked “EAN32 travel” actually contained EAN50, and the one marked “EAN50 deco” contained 32%. Underwater, they executed thei...
The following accounts were taken from social media posts following a fatality in poor visibility in an inland dive site. The comments have been modified slightly. As this blog is focused more on decision-making for instructors, it will focus on the bigger, but often invisible, decisions that tak...
Are you being heard? Are you creating the space to be heard? At the end of the season, we took a mixed group of fun divers to the Farnes Islands (United Kingdom). ‘Fun’ divers plus two sets of students who were finishing off some training programmes with ‘real world experience’. The forecast was...
When the Team Isn’t a Team I was part of a ‘team’ that was undertaking some training prior to a reassessment for a technical diver training programme. There were three of us involved. Two of us had been fairly busy developing our team and technical skills, making sure that we could stay neutrall...
Divers and instructors don’t learn because it requires investment and change, and that is hard. Organisations don’t learn because the operational or 'local' safety problem is not theirs. This blog summarises the free webinar I gave earlier this year, which looks at the death of 18-year-old diver...
