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You made it. You’re an instructor. You’ve earned the card, checked the boxes, and maybe even landed a job. But sometimes, maybe when you’re loading gear in the truck or reviewing your next class roster… a voice in the back of your head whispers:
“Am I actually ready for this?” If that’s you, you’re not alone. This isn’t a takedown of the zero-to-hero path. That system offers a clear road for passionate divers to turn their dreams into credentials quickly. It’s efficient. It’s popular. And it’s produced thousands of working professionals across the globe. But let’s be real about what it doesn’t always produce: True confidence, underwater mastery, and professional-level decision-making. And that’s not your fault. That’s the system’s limitation. But what happens next… that part is up to you. What the Card Doesn’t Cover Zero-to-hero courses are built to move fast. That speed is the appeal. But this quick class comes at a cost. You get certified, but you don’t always get seasoned. Often, these Instructor Development Courses don’t have the time to teach you how to deal with real stress underwater. They might talk about the need for situational awareness, however developing this ability while in an unpredictable environment takes a lot of time. Real time diving and teaching. You cant just show someone how to make critical decisions with a limited amount of information, it takes time. Refining your control, keeping your composure along with your buoyancy, balance, and trim… staying cool and clear headed while under stress, is an attribute that needs steady attention. In order for you to take all of the information and turn it into your own teaching style… a style that is rooted in substance and not just a generic script… well, that is something that cannot be taught in an IDC. The result? A lot of instructors and divemasters walk away feeling like they’ve skipped a chapter… or maybe even an entire book. You might know how to demonstrate a fin pivot, show the critical attributes of a mask clear, or even deliver a dive briefing… but you still feel uneasy in anything beyond a perfect pool or a calm, tropical reef. Especially as you near the deeper depths of recreational diving. Additionally, many instructors are handing out Advanced Certifications after only 5 more additional dives beyond Open Water. We know that these students are not advanced, but we give them a card anyway. Let alone certifying divers as Deep Divers, on air, using single tanks… something no real deep divers do. Unfortunately, when these divers finally learn the truth, it’s us instructors who look like the fools. That’s the part nobody wants to admit. But I will—because I’ve been there, too. Looking Good vs. Being Good In today’s social media dive culture, looking the part is easy. Perfect trim. Matching gear. The smiling selfie after a dive. But being the part? That’s different. A true underwater professional has a level of situational awareness that can’t be faked. They are cool under pressure. A true professional has a respect for the environment and an ability to always control it. They can focus and complete a mission but still maintain a global awareness. The true underwater professional is humble and knows that growth is always possible within themselves and other divers. Confidence underwater isn’t about flair, it’s about foundation. It comes from repetition, reflection, mentorship, and real feedback. Without those, many instructors get stuck. They plateau. They burnout. Or worse, they pass on their uncertainty to the next generation of divers. That’s not what you signed up for. You got into this to share something profound. Let’s help you get back to that. DIR: More Than Just a Tech Diver’s Buzzword Maybe you’ve heard of DIR--Doing It Right. Maybe you think it’s only for cave divers, tech heads, or gear geeks. But I’m here to tell you: The DIR framework holds some of the most essential tools any instructor can adopt—no matter your background. Here’s why: • Consistency: Every dive, every team member, every plan has a predictable structure. That creates safety—and peace of mind. • Clarity: No extra clutter. Clean configuration. Clean procedures. Less time fumbling = more time leading. • Competence: Trim, buoyancy, communication, and gas planning aren’t just personal skills—they’re leadership skills. DIR isn’t dogma. It’s discipline. And when you integrate those principles into your professional diving, everything changes. You don’t just look like a leader. You are one. Mentorship Over Machismo Here’s the problem with how our industry talks about growth: We reward certifications, not competence. We reward bravado, not humility. At Mott Underwater, we’re flipping that script. You don’t need another card. You don’t need to pretend. What you need is support, structure, and someone who’s been where you are. My mentorship program is built for instructors and pros who want to: • Regain confidence without ego • Sharpen their fundamentals through modern DIR application • Get real, honest feedback in a supportive environment • Lead with clarity, calm, and confidence—underwater and in life From Imposter to Instructor You’re not an imposter. You’re just unfinished—and that’s a powerful place to be. With the right guidance, unfinished becomes unstoppable. Start by downloading my Instructor Confidence & Reflection Checklist—a free tool to help you take inventory of your current skills, challenges, and growth edges. Use it to find clarity on where you are and where you want to go. Then, when you’re ready, let’s talk. Join the Mott Underwater mentorship community. Schedule a coaching call. Or just reach out for a real conversation with someone who’s been in your fins. It’s not about proving yourself. It’s about preparing yourself. Let’s build that confidence together.
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DIR diving has always stood on a rather uncomfortable truth. It wasn’t built to be flashy. It wasn’t intended to be TikTok-able.
It was built for reality. I know you see people post perfect trim reels every day on Instagram, but that’s not it. Sure… big, clean, powerful open water back-kicks look sweet but that doesn’t mean anything in real life. Much less in a delicate and restricted environment. Yes, Rule-6 (always look cool) might sound flashy to the uninitiated, but it runs much deeper than that. DIR isn’t a card you buy, it isn’t an agency, it isn’t just a class you took that one weekend a couple years ago. There’s a kind of diver who gets this. And a kind who doesn’t. For a lot of people, there seems to be something more to diving that they are still waiting for. Something that often feels like it’s always missing. Regardless of their collection of certification cards. It’s easy to clip on a GoPro and call yourself an explorer nowadays. You paid your money and got your Advanced Deep Technical Solo Pony Procedures card. You’re certified. It’s harder to spend the rest of your life… every single time you get in the water, without exception, doing the right thing. Regardless of how cold it is, or how rushed you are because it’s hot and you just want to cool off in the water, or because deep air is cheaper, or because you’re with other divers who don’t care. It's hard doing the right thing. Every single time. The diver’s path, especially the DIR diver, isn’t about what’s easy. It’s about what’s necessary… not just for you, but for your teammates, for the dive, and for the thousands of decisions you don’t know you’ll have to make until you must make them. And that decision will come at the worst possible time. No pause button. No, wait a second. No, “Mommy, I don’t want to play anymore.” I remember very well, the time when DIR was hated by the entire scuba industry and the rest of the scuba community also. Then it slowly started to get adopted by the diving community and word spread via the internet… and when that happened, it became a threat to the industry. Many of us were told by shop owners to get it out of their stores. By the time SCUBA hit the millennium and we entered the 2000’s, Doing It Right, meant something. But most of the industry didn’t care. They just wanted to sell equipment. DIR was labeled as arrogant, elitist, unattainable. DIR was the enemy. DIR is not arrogant. It never was. It doesn’t mean “perfect.” It never has. It means intentional. It means accountable. It means you put the training in, even when no one’s watching, and especially when it’s inconvenient. Because you are the redundancy. You are the system. You are the backup plan. The industry slowly began to adopt some of the jargon and bullet points that we had been using for decades. Eventually, all the major training agencies began to add some DIR filler to their training materials. But never calling it DIR. Buoyancy, suddenly became more than just balancing on your fin tips. Gas planning became more than, “Be on the boat with 500psi.” Decompression became more than ascend slower than your bubbles. Neutral buoyancy, horizontal trim and the DIR equipment configuration became normal. But that’s not all there is to it. In fact, none of that is strictly DIR, it’s just diving. DIR just made it relevant in the late 1990’s. The early pillars of DIR; Gas Selection (No Deep Air), Diver Preparedness, The Unified Team, and Situational Awareness… were not completely foreign to scuba, however they were often ignored for economy and convenience. Eventually new trends would come into the game. New colors of “DIR-style” gear. Rebreathers. Sidemount. Self-Reliant. Carbon fiber. Hand mirrors and automatic trim-adjusting, buoyancy-correcting, “Do It For You” gadgets to sell the unsuspecting diver/customer. New ways to distract them from what the point of it all really was. What the purpose was supposed to be. All of it, engineered in a board room to take you off the path. To reprogram you buy your status and ability instead of work hard for it. And then Instagram hit. And reels, and tic-toks, and youtube. But DIR wasn’t built for today’s social media. It was built to stop people from dying in a place where they didn’t belong. It was built to remind people that another diver’s life was counting on them to be 100% aware, 100% of the time. And it was built to make anyone able to be that diver. Anyone who cared. Not just the legends. And that is what makes DIR harder. Too hard for most. But if you put in the work… the continuous work… it will make you better. What really happens when you are underwater… When you really need to preform and not make things worse? That is the reality that you want to chase, not a card. Quiet commitment, not loud validation. Honest work, not cosmetic c-cards. If you’re chasing growth as a diver, look for challenges, not convenience. Look for truth, not trophies. Look for competence, not credentials. DIR is a hard path. It demands patience. Humility. Teamwork. And those rarely come easy, especially the latter. Teamwork is the hardest. That is exactly why everyone falls for the Solo card! But it’s the discomfort that changes you. It’s the struggle that sharpens you. You are forging the steel of understanding. An understanding of what you do when it matters most, when you don’t know for sure what will come out of you. You’re becoming a diver. Not just another human with a collection of certification cards who swims underwater. You’re becoming a real diver. Caring about a team, just as much as yourself. And… you’re doing it with purpose. You’re doing it with values. You’re Doing It Right. -James Mott Mackinaw City, MI. Our home for three days of diving in the Straits of Mackinac. Mackinac, Mackinaw… different spellings but they have the same pronunciation. You probably have to be from Michigan to know that. It is a mix of the French and Native Ojibwe word to describe the Island and the modernized phonetic spelling to describe the tourist city where we were staying.
Day one was beautiful. The weather was great, wind was light, and we had seas good for the ride over to the Eber Ward over on the Lake Michigan side of the 5 mile long Mackinac Bridge. A 213 foot long, wooden freighter sitting in 140 ft of water. Short of a little rebreather problem with me that needed fixing, everything was perfect. Dive two was on the square-sterned wooden schooner Maitland in 80 feet of water, and I was back in business... ready to dive. We topped-off gas later that day and readied ourselves for the next morning. A full day on the Cedarville—an historic Great Lakes wreck sitting silently in deep, dark, cold water just below 100 feet. A massive steel freighter over 600 feet long. The forecast however looked questionable, it was a definite maybe. But the Great Lakes are unpredictable. That’s part of their charm—and their danger. The next morning, the winds were up, the skies were dark, storms were a-brewing… Captain Brian said we had a small window to get out and give her a try. But as we approached the mooring, we found ourselves in an explosion of light that was shooting out of the nearly black skies. We were sitting ducks for the lightning storm and needed to get back to the harbor fast. No diving today. No diver likes to hear that. But the ones who have been around know: Doing It Right sometimes means not doing it at all. So we left what gear we could on the boat, headed back to the hotel , brushed off the disappointment, and decided to walk through the rain and meet at the pub for Bloody Mary’s and conversation—our dreams deferred, but not defeated. Same dive teams, different dive site. And that’s when the magic started. Spicy Bloody Mary’s and cold beers were passed around. Someone started scrolling through dive photos. One picture turned into a story. That story sparked another. One table turned into two as more divers showed up. And soon, the tables were a living, breathing archive of Great Lakes diving—years of experience, laughter, hard-earned lessons, and shared memories. You hear me talk a lot about trim, and balance, and buoyancy— it’s often what people think about when they hear DIR, but there is more. It’s about team. It’s about respect. It’s about shared responsibility and shared adventure—on the boat, in the water, and sometimes, in the bar when the weather says, “No diving today.” At that table, we dissected wrecks, recalled perfect dives and imperfect ones. We talked about training— the struggles and the triumphs in our journey to become better divers. We didn’t dive today, but we still dived deep—into stories, philosophy, the heart of why we do this in the first place. That bar was filled with the same things you find in a good team dive: trust, humility, knowledge, and the kind of friendship that only gets stronger when tested. Because this is the real secret: We dive for the adventure, yes. We dive for the history, the mystery, the beauty of the underwater world— of course. But mostly—we dive for each other. So when the lake says “not today,” we listen. We reroute. We gather. We share. And in those moments—over beers and picture and videos—we remember: The best parts of diving aren’t always underwater. The next morning the seas had settled. Flat calm. One of those mornings when the lake which was so furious the day before, was now flat as glass. A magical mirror of surface water reflecting the sky and the sun in a way that seems to say, “Come on in, the water is fine.” And we dived the Cedarville. ------------ Have you been weathered out lately? Share some of your stormy dive stories with me. Email or comment on my blog or face book page and tell me. Tell all of us. Because even when the waves keep us on shore, we still have a lot of diving to do. 6/4/2025 1 Comment The Discipline of DescendingYou’ll never forget the feeling of stepping into the water for a dive. You’ll still be able to describe it to everyone at the nursing home, long after you’ve hung up your fins for good. The crash of the water, the silencing of the surface world, and the enchantment of the bubbling fizz around you. You’re underwater now. You’re sealed off from the surface with a growing obligation of time and decompression, no matter how small or lengthy… you have a new responsibility in your life.
All that equipment you carry underwater to become a diver is a new weight on your shoulders, a carefully chosen burden you bear to yourself and the team you enter the water with. Most divers feel it when they waddle in their fins to the back of the boat or when exhausting themselves in a sauna-effect of neoprene and latex. Why do we do this? Cold-water divers plunging into to chilling depths of the Great Lakes. But for what? To swim by a shipwreck? Or under the ice? Or into a cave? Who does that? A twin-set of steel tanks on your back. Hundreds of pounds of equipment weighing you down, keeping you alive, one o-ring away from an emergency. But for some of us, that weight is something else entirely. It’s not a burden. It’s not an inconvenience. It’s a reminder. It’s the price of discipline. Horizontal. Controlled. Breathing… exhaling out with intention, not panic. There’s a stillness to that kind of descent. You feel every inch of pressure building, every exhaled breath deepening your descent . It’s not dramatic. It’s deliberate. It’s also kind of beautiful— like a lesson from "Zen and the Art of Archery" but with a backplate and wing. You’re not just going deeper. You’re committing. Putting The Regulator In Your Mouth When you voluntarily inhibit the most natural function in the human body… it can not be on accident. Breathing is a symbol. An obligation. A contract with your buoyancy. An agreement you made with yourself and your team before the dive ever started. That gas was analyzed, labeled, and discussed. You know the dive, you know the decompression, you know what you are going to do. And so do your team mates. You are a unified team of individual, integrated, and interchangeable divers. You are in control. You will always be there. Every kick of your fins is a promise. A promise to your team mates. A promise to yourself. A pride in how we do things. You’re not trying to be a hero, you’re trying to be dependable. You need to be predictable. You’re part of this team and your presence makes it stronger. You’re an asset. Do It Right It’s so easy to say, “Close enough,” during a valve drill. It’s so easy to laugh-off poor technique during a practice dive. It’s so easy to keep swimming when what you need to learn is to stay perfectly still in the water column. We are often so worried about impressing our instructors that we don’t want to admit that we still need to work on something. We can easily hyper-focus on every little connection, every clip, every single D-ring to the point where we still miss the blinding obvious problems right before our eyes. In an effort to look good for our instructors, we forget what our team is for. Rule #6 Everyone wants to look good. But this takes time and discipline. You’re going to break some underwater eggs along the way. Not because you’re not good, not because you don’t know what you’re doing, but because it’s part of the process. It’s how you become disciplined. It’s not your Ego needing you to look good, but rather the controlling of your Ego that allows you to be ready to learn from your mistakes. To get better. Doing It Right is about more than buoyancy and trim. It’s about humility. Even When No One’s Watching The beauty — and the curse — of DIR is that it’s never just about the dive. It’s about the approach. It’s about doing the pre-dive check even when it’s a 15-foot shore dive in bathtub conditions. It’s about having your backup light clipped off properly, even if you’re not planning to turn it on. It’s about descending slowly, on target, no surprises. Because when you aim to do things right every time, you don’t have to improvise when things go sideways. And let’s be honest: eventually, things will. The doubles don’t get lighter. The team doesn’t get easier. But you will all get better. You will learn to carry it with less drama, blowing fewer bubbles, and with a little more grace. Maybe that’s what keeps some of us coming back — that, and the occasional perfect moment where your team is in sync, the viz is clear, and you forget that the surface even exists… for just a moment. Discipline It’s not about perfection. It’s about progress through discipline. Momentum. About respecting the weight you carry, not just physically, but ethically — to your team, to the dive plan, and to the sport itself. And, to yourself! So, the next time you’re standing there, ready to enter the water… All of your gear weighing down on you... All of your procedures, your plans, your acronyms… so much to forget. So easy to mess up. Don’t worry about that one little thing that you might do wrong. Because it’s not about the one little thing, it’s about all of it together. The system. Breathe it all in. Breathe it all out. Step in and Do It Right. 5/21/2025 2 Comments The Sacred Rhythm of the RegulatorThere’s a moment—right after you step into the water, just as the bubbles clear—when time bends.
It’s not dramatic. No thunderclap of transformation. Just the quiet presence of breath in your ears. Happy bubbles. Inhale. Pause. Exhale. The regulator hisses like a monk sweeping a stone floor. Steady, unhurried, deliberate. Underwater, breath becomes everything. On scuba, your breathing controls your buoyancy. You must develop a rhythmic flow of in and out that will build the foundation of your buoyancy control. Within that breathing is where you develop mental, physical, and environmental awareness. On land, we forget we’re breathing. We speak over it, we stress through it, and we rush past it. We are ruled by gravity not buoyancy. But underwater, that changes. Your breath is your tether to life, it’s your metronome of existence. It is your balance and your control. Every inhale is survival. Every exhale is surrender. It’s the most honest thing you do. Breathing is buoyancy, and buoyancy is balance, and balance is control. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. It becomes a kind of prayer almost—not one with words, but one with rhythm. The beat of the bubble. A liturgy not spoken, but felt. Each cycle of breath, a reminder: I am here. I am alive. I am in control. Your terrestrial life ends when you enter the water. Traffic, emails, rent… they are all gone. You have been reborn into a new life. You breathe. You look. You listen. You become part of the water. And in that sacred space, your breath begins to take on a meaning beyond survival. You start to notice how your mind, and heart, and soul all live in your lungs. How shallow, erratic breathing means that your mind is scattered and your buoyancy is a mess. And most importantly, how a patient and calm inhale, pause, and controlled exhale will ground you. Your breathing becomes an offering—one you can’t ignore. The water will not let you. It’s a strange kind of church, this place. The water. Under the water. No stained glass. No pews. Just god rays lighting up a shipwreck or cathedral of coral. No preacher, just a sermon of the current flowing in a slow procession, unending, as if time is a suggestion, not a rule. You don’t need theology to feel sacred here. You just need to breathe. And when you surface—breaking through into the light and sound and gravity—it comes with a kind of baptism. Nothing but horizon…. Wonder…. Then reality…. The entire world of water slapping you in the face, salted lips maybe…. The weight of the world creeping back onto your shoulders. Heavy, as you climb the ladder back onto the boat. Then… you remember something. Something that might just carry you through the all the bubbles: Breathing, is not just a function of living. It’s practice. Its presence. It’s prayer. In that breath is where you will find peace. 7/2/2024 0 Comments Total Peace UnderwaterSo many of us divers got into scuba because we were looking for an adventure. An escape. A way to get away from the troubles we face on our earthly world.
It’s an escape from home and work, when we travel away to exotic islands filled with new cultures, new people, and new dive sites. We take up diving because we are looking for a fun sport or exercise. It’s an activity we can do with new and interesting equipment to learn. It’s is a physical activity where we can learn new skills and stay active and feel like we are doing something exciting with ourselves. Equipment moves us through the water. Equipment allows us to breathe underwater. Equipment tells us when we need to leave the water. And just like the baseball player needs the bat. And just like the musician needs the guitar. The scuba diver needs the fin to swim, the regulator to breathe, and the certification card to be a diver. So what makes one diver better than another? Better gear? More logged dives? More destinations visited? Does having the gear, the log book, or the C-card fulfill the quest for precision buoyancy control that so many divers long for? And what happens when all the cards have been collected? What happens when the log book is full? Does the perfect control finally come? Is peace of mind somewhere there to be found in the pages of the log book? Does that translate to our lives on land? Diving is life, life is diving. Not as a way of kicking water to propel yourself along a reef. Not as a collection of skills that need to be learned to stay safe underwater. Not as an activity to share with buddies and compare log books. But as something more spiritual in itself. Peace. Total peace underwater, which can ultimately show you the way to total peace in all of your life. Perfect trim, buoyancy control, and great kicks are not your goal. Nor is the best dive gear, or the log book full of exotic locations. The goal is not to have the most certifications or the highest level of certification. Your goal is total peace underwater. If you have Total Peace Underwater, you’ll also have the perfect trim, the precision buoyancy control and the magical kicks and everything else that you need as a diver. But not because that is what you are seeking. But because that is the result of being at total peace underwater. If you focus on your breathing and your peace of mind; then the skills and attributes of what you want to look like underwater will happen. They have to. They can’t "Not Happen" if your goal is total peace underwater. The goal is not getting neutrally buoyant but instead to be neutral buoyancy. The goal is not to stay in trim but to be the trim that the environment needs when you need to fix your trim for the environment. If you struggle with buoyancy and balance and trim, it is because you are focusing on these things, instead of being present in the art of diving. The art where finally becoming neutrally buoyant and truly at peace underwater is just the beginning. A rebirth where, now, you can really dive. You are buoyancy. You are trim. You are at peace. The skills we work on in The Essentials are not really diving skills at all. They might be to the new student, at that time. They are buoyancy work, and improving personal skills, and developing team skills and how to be in control enough to think and see more. To enjoy more. We do need to work on these as divers but they are not the goal. And as long as you still focus on them as the goal, you will continue to work on fixing something in yourself. We are not just diving underwater. But, diving into ourselves. Where what we really need is Total Peace Underwater. 6/20/2024 3 Comments Never Become An Advanced Diver!I am going to tell you something that NO scuba instructor in their right mind would ever say to you. NO dive shop will ever tell you what I am about to say. It goes against everything the entire scuba industry has been working towards for over the last 50 years.
Never become an Advanced Diver! I know what you’re thinking. “But James, how do I get better? I need to take my advanced open water!” Most divers receive an invitation for their advanced class at the same time they are getting the congratulatory handshake for completing their basic open water dives. All it takes to be an advanced diver is 9 dives. But does that card really give you the confidence of being an advanced diver. What really does that term, advanced, even mean? I see divers of all different levels in the water and they all seem to struggle with the same few things. The Essentials of Buoyancy, Balance, Trim, and Propulsion. Which ultimately affects their confidence. These basic skills are the core to your foundation underwater and most certification card models are built around bypassing these foundational skills. Rather than building a strong base to build your confidence underwater, most divers are sold the idea that it is advanced specialty classes that will make them better divers. So, why then do I teach the Essentials to scuba instructors? Divemasters? Advanced Divers? To divers who are already certified technical divers? What is it that they are missing? It is not a high level secret skill. In fact, it is much simpler than that. It is a mindset. It is a commitment to keep the beginners mind. The problem we fall into with scuba is that we are tricked into an idea that we need to keep giving and receiving positive reinforcement. Handshakes, and shiny gold certification cards, and elegant wall certificates; instead of a prescription of long-term foundational practice. Deep rooted instinct and rote memory from a drowning repetition of our core fundamentals is the way to become an advanced diver. Not by taking quick classes that teach a few new fancy tricks to try at night, or while deeper, or while identifying fish. That is the fools way of advancing your diving. If you need training to dive a little deeper, you should get it. But keep your beginners mind. If you want to learn how to dive at night, yes… take a class. But keep your beginners mind. Never let your certifications let you think or feel that you’re better than you really are. Your proof will be in the water. When you don’t get anxious about a safety stop. When you don’t wonder if you’ve got enough air. When you never worry about where your buddy is. When you don’t have to hold on to something or kneel on something to stay still for a picture. When you don’t leave a trail of silt behind you. When you are truly ocean friendly. This is when you know you are advancing yourself, but you won’t need a card to tell you that. Because it can’t. It’s how you present yourself to the underwater world that shows how advanced you are. The True Advanced Diver will never let themselves admit to being advanced. They will never think that they don’t need to work on improving their fundamental skills. They know that it is not the advanced card that makes them advanced, but rather a calm and a comfort in the Essentials that makes them safe and confident. And that, makes them Advanced. 6/6/2024 1 Comment Fully EngageLife is stressful today. We are always under pressure to do more with less, and the stress seems to keep building year after year. Luckily for some of us, we have diving. A way to get away from it all. No emails. No cell phones. Just being underwater blowing bubbles. In our happy place. Free from it all, where our problems go away….
*Record Scratches* But wait! What if you run out of air? What if an O-ring fails?? What if you lose your buddy??? What if… sharks or something???? The reality is that we are always playing poker with the fates when we breathe underwater. You can open any scuba accident and incident report from any year and see that they are filled with fatalities from very shallow waters and well within NDL limitations. Dives that start off as a way to get away from it all, that ironically end with that very thing… literally. Dead. I challenge you to rethink your “get away from it all” mentality underwater, and instead to “fully engage yourself.” Go all in. Go 100% into what you are doing underwater. Things happen when we are diving. Weird, unusual, and unexpected things happen all the time. Usually, at the worst time. The accident isn’t even caused by that weird thing, but rather how the diver reacted to the situation because they were turned off and just blowing bubbles and enjoying the moment. They were not fully engaged with being underwater. Unfortunately, as divers, we can’t just quit and give up when things go wrong like you can in a driveway basketball game, or a bike ride, or family reunion cornhole match. For a diver, if the stress starts building underwater and the urge to quit and bailout of the game rises, it means there is a likelihood of a serious injury and possible fatality. Every foot of depth and minute of time that passes for a diver puts them further into a place where no matter how bad it gets; they must remain calm and clear headed. It’s a conundrum that divers face, where the time they could have an anxious moment that leads to panic will most certainly come at the worst possible time for a panic situation to occur. Even the most mundane and recreational of dives will have most likely invited some type of a decompression obligation that requires them to stay underwater and not do what they want to do which is quit and go to the surface and get out. In "The Essentials," I teach divers how to fully engage and how to take ownership of their diving. To know what your gauges will show before you look at them. To know exactly where your buddy is before you look for them. To start every dive always assuming the worst, so that you are ready to bring out your best. It is the opposite of every other class you’ve taken. It is the opposite of buying expensive computers and gadgets to make your diving easier and safer. Instead, it is learning to fully engage into the dive so that you are safer because you are fully present and aware. The Wrong WayLearning to dive is just like learning to ride a bike…. Meaning, all of us were taught the wrong way.
We all know the old saying about something being, “like riding a bike.” It means that once you know how to do it, you’ll never forget. It’s so easy, it’s like riding a bike. But can you remember learning to ride a bike? You were given a bike with training wheels. Maybe a helmet. Maybe knee and elbow pads if your parents really loved you. You we’re told to, “just pedal.” You spent months, years maybe, on a wobbly bicycle bouncing back and forth against training wheels to keep you upright while you tried to learn how to pedal up and down the driveway. That was wrong. When the day finally came for you to take the training wheels off, you still didn’t know how to ride a bike. You fell over. You had to relearn everything. Because riding a bike has nothing to do with pedaling, it has to do with balance. Years of practice. Years of waiting. Trying. Building up courage and confidence only to have it all come crashing down on you when you tried to go without the training wheels for the first time. You fell. Bumped your head, hurt your elbows and knees, maybe you broke a wrist. Because you still didn’t know how to ride a bike. The alternative to adding training wheels would be to simply remove the pedals. You would have learned to stand and hold the bike up with your feet. Take a few steps and glide. Then glide a little further and stay up a little longer. Step, step, step and then glide away on your bicycle until you got so good at gliding that adding the pedals allowed you to keep gliding around town. Going and going forever. That’s how you ride a bike. Balance. Control. Confidence. This is the problem with scuba instruction. The weekend class model that says if you buy enough fancy gear, diving is easy and anyone can do it. Let the equipment take care of everything. Underwater training wheels that tell you to keep breathing, never hold your breath, and you can always drop your weights and go to the surface. That is wrong. Human proprioception, the sense we have of how to move and hold ourselves, is completely different underwater. It must be learned correctly. A new instinct and understanding of ourselves is Essential to become a Confident Diver. Of course if you want to wear training wheels forever underwater, there is plenty of equipment to buy. Scuba is full of gear fixes for you to purchase. Swimming is too hard, try split fins. Afraid you’ll run out of air? Get a Spare-Air Pony Bottle. Don’t like choking on salt water? Buy this dry snorkel. Rarely do they get to the root of the problem, but there is always another gear fix. Mouth fatigue? You should have a custom molded mouthpiece. Too much gear? Get rid of a hose with this Alternate-Inflator regulator. Always losing your buddy? Try this underwater honker, banger, rattle, horn…. They are all training wheels. The alternative would be to learn the building blocks of becoming a confident diver. Buoyancy, Balance, Trim, Propulsion, Body Mechanics, Awareness. That’s how you dive. Balance. Control. Confidence. The ESM (Extreme Scuba Makeover) has become one of my most successful and popular classes. This one day experience takes you back to the beginning. To relearn and break down all of the necessary underwater body mechanics and awareness that you need to be a real diver. To understand what your body is doing, and why. To show you what you really look like underwater. The ESM is for any diver in any equipment configuration. The Essentials is the way you fully immerse yourself into this new way of thinking. It is an intense, multi-day, complete reprogramming. It covers equipment configuration, gas planning, dive planning, team awareness, underwater skills, propulsion techniques, and everything you need to get started on becoming a new diver. To become a thinking diver. A comfortable, competent, and confident diver. Take a look at the training materials here at the UTD Scuba Diving site. Are you ready to make a change this diving season? Contact me for a free 30 minute zoom call to discuss any questions you have about your diving. 3/6/2023 0 Comments Are you a “bad” buddy?Every certified diver knows about the buddy system in scuba. Some of us like it, some of us tolerate it, and others are out looking for a solo diver certification.
If you’ve ever been partnered up on a dive boat with a “bad” buddy, you know how frustrating it can be. If you’ve ever been partnered up on a dive boat and never heard from that person again, you might have been the “bad” buddy. The problem with the buddy system is that it isn’t really taught. It’s mentioned. It’s encouraged and required by most dive boats. It’s discussed in a classroom. But it isn’t taught. Being a good dive buddy takes training, work, and practice. It is not just swimming around the same dive site with someone else just in case they run out of air. A good buddy is an integral part of the dive system. No less important than having your regulator properly connected or having the right breathing gas. If you have an alternate air source but don’t have a buddy ready and aware to use it, it is useless. There is no reason to have a buddy with you if they cannot maintain buoyancy control, ascent rate, and depth awareness with you during an air share emergency. Having a buddy that is following a different computer with a different ascent schedule or decompression profile is the equivalent of not having a buddy. But all to often this is the case with the “Rent A Buddy” protocol you see on many dive boats. The standards say you must dive with a buddy, and that means you are assigned one if you didn’t book the charter with your own. Whether or not this buddy will be an asset or a liability is rarely of concern to the dive staff, they are merely following the rules. Unfortunately the rule doesn’t say everyone needs a competent and properly trained buddy, it just says you must dive with a buddy… any buddy. Most instruction focuses on teaching the student diver a list of personal skills and no time is really spent on team building. It is assumed that if you are certified to dive, adding a second person is only going to benefit and make the dive better and safer. But that is rarely the case. The term, Same Ocean Buddy, would not be in the vernacular of every diver throughout the world if there wasn’t a constant reality of being paired up with one. This pairing usually leads to two divers becoming untrained, unequipped, and unprepared solo divers. Furthermore, the concept of a solo diving certification typically requires following an instructor around on a shallow dive and carrying two of everything you typically only have one of. However, simply adding additional gear does not make the diver safer. Instead this redundancy becomes a mess of unnecessary excess where a competent team mate should be. Divers need to learn the basics of diving, just to get started. We need to understand this new environment we are in, the physics involved, the equipment needed, etc. Being in a three-dimensional world is something completely different for humans to experience underwater, that is foundational in your learning. Everything else is built upon that. How to breathe, stay still, control buoyancy and move efficiently are essential. After that we can start adding the new equipment we have for diving. How to use a regulator. How to use a mask underwater. Monitoring gauges. Deploying emergency equipment like alternate breathing sources. After the diver can control their own buoyancy and manage their emergency resources themselves, then they need to do it with someone else. A buddy. But they need to be able to do it together. You can’t do an air share with one diver losing buoyancy and going up while the other diver is losing buoyancy and going down. It doesn’t work and therefore the divers are not ready to be on their own in the open water. Even outside of the gas emergency, just making an ascent together as a dive team means the buddies need to be thinking the same thing, expecting the same thing, and doing the same thing. Otherwise they are not a buddy team, they are just two divers underwater at the same time doing two different things. That is not a team. The problem is that it takes time to get a group of divers to this point. Time that will generally exceed the amount allotted in a typical scuba class. Time pressures and the economics of a traditional “learn to scuba dive course” will continue to produce divers unable to fulfill their obligations as a dive buddy. As a community, from the bottom up, we need to make this change because they are not giving it to us from the top down. Good instruction is out there but it is up to the diving community to stop accepting the minimum standard and seeking only the cheapest price. Together we can change our own identity as confident scuba divers. To be seen as real divers. Confident, competent, and comfortable underwater, ready for our new environment. Are you interested in learning more about being a better team mate underwater? Consider the taking the UTD Essentials with me this summer. Get your buddies together and let’s turn you into a real underwater team of thinking divers. |
James Mott
James has been a PADI instructor since 1998 and was one of the original 10 instructors for UTD Scuba Diving in 2009. Archives
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