Before I really get stuck into this post and the associated self-reflection, I should start by answering the above question: I don’t consider myself a very experienced diver. For people who don’t dive at all, or often, that will seem like false modesty, but for people who dive regularly or professionally, it will seem a very appropriate self-assessment. I’m not bad. I’m getting there. I’m not “very experienced”.
I got my basic Open Water in 2007, and my Advanced in 2008 without having done much diving in the meantime (both PADI certifications). Stress & Rescue (SSI certification) followed in 2010, and this year I qualified for Marine Research Diver by adding on the SSI Night & Limited Visibility, Navigation, and Search & Recovery certifications. This is all so I meet basic Australian Worksafe standards for institutional diving, meaning that when my supervisor gets a wistful yen for more samples, I can head out with him and we can do a simple shore dive and pick up a bunch of brittle stars.
I have done a few courses. That doesn’t make me a very experienced diver.
I have 97 dives (ah, so close to that century mark!), the vast majority of them in the past four years (with a gap in 2009, where for various reasons I did not dive for a year. I never want to take a break that long again).
Ninety-seven dives over four years – three years, really, with the gap – averages out to about 32 dives per year (slightly less if I could be bothered accounting for the very few dives I did between my Open Water and my Advanced, and I can’t. Be bothered, that is). Not bad, not bad at all.
But let’s really look at my diving experience.
The kind of fieldwork I do involves getting close to the bottom in shallow water (almost always less than nine metres, and usually less than five metres), turning over heavy rocks, picking up wiggly invertebrates that often try to get away (with the exception of the sea-stars which are, I like to say, easy pickins’), and shoving them into a ziploc bag (and I have some fun stories about that process too. It’s why I usually have the fingers cut off one glove).
This fieldwork has taken place primarily on the southern coast of Australia, extending from Busselton in Western Australia (just south of Perth) to Coffs Harbour up in New South Wales (not really the south coast any more). We sample at places that are often not convenient to recreational divers, and often difficult to access. For financial reasons – and also for the preferred habitats of the animals I focus on – we are restricted to shore dives.
This means I have a fair chunk of experience dealing with the following situations:
1) rough water. Obviously we call it off if we’re not comfortable getting in the water, but sometimes we make an assessment and decide that, okay, it looks a bit rough, but it’s a restricted area, and here’s how we can manage that risk; we’re reasonably strong swimmers and we should be okay (note: it helps that, since we have to be close to the bottom, we tend to slightly over-weight ourselves. Being over-weighted makes rough water a lot easier to deal with for obvious reasons, but it also means you go through your air a bit faster)
2) cold water. Diving in Tasmania, for example, is often not a balmy experience. It can be gorgeous, and if you ever go there, it’s well worth the effort (Waterhouse Passage, off Buzzard’s Landing on the north coast was one of my all-time favourite fieldwork dives. It’s a long swim out over sand and seagrass, but once you get there it’s a gorgeous seagrass meadow with bommies rising everywhere, fantastic unspoiled growth all over the rocks, and on the day that we went, shafts of sunlight slanting through the water. Quite shallow, but just beautiful). It’s not super-cold; it has gotten down to perhaps ten degrees Celsius on occasion, though 14 was more common (New South Wales was a wonderful exception). This means I have acquired some experience diving in a dry suit, which leads to…
3) ….buoyancy control issues. I’m the first to admit that my buoyancy control is not great. Ninety-seven dives in and occasionally I still struggle with appropriate weighting. It probably comes from spending so much time sitting on the bottom, but a lot of it has to do with shallow diving. Buoyancy control is much, much easier on deeper dives – I’ve been amazed when I get below about 12 metres how much better I am in the water. Below 12 metres, I feel like my trim (general position and manoeuvrability in the water) is amazing. Still, that’s not where I “live” as they say; I have to deal with the challenges of my chosen environment. I do give myself credit for frequently diving in a neoprene dry suit in rough water in less than five metres. I could be doing a lot worse than I am, and buoyancy control issues, by-and-large, don’t freak me out (with one notable exception, which I now find a kind of hilarious story that I may post on one day. Suffice to say, Blairgowrie pier is cursed for me, pretty as it is).
4) Shallow water. See above.
5) Poor visibility. This is a huge issue on the south coast of Australia. For fieldwork, we often don’t have the luxury of waiting for better conditions. We’re in that spot on that day, and if it’s not stupidly rough (and presuming there are no shark reports), that’s where we’re diving (note: for anyone reading this who specialises in that area, yes, we do lots of risk assessments and hazard listing). So there have been some dives which are just muck, muck, and more muck (Albany Town Jetty, W.A.; Cowes Jetty, Philip Island. Ick. I do remember the really bad ones). I am not made uncomfortable by poor visibility any more, and I have a good relationship with my compass these days.
6) Lost buddy. On low-visibility dives I tend to try to stick to my supervisor/dive buddy like glue (see above), but it’s easy to get separated, so we have to make a few extra assumptions and restrictions (i.e., we’re staying in this restricted area – a pier or jetty, or a well-circumscribed cove, is ideal – and we will probably surface and touch base at least once during the dive, remembering that these are very shallow). The other thing is that with regard to our work, which is basically hunting and exploring, too many cooks really do spoil the brew. It’s very easy to get in each other’s faces (I like to say that there are very few fields of study where it’s accepted that your supervisor is probably going to kick you in the face at some point – and vice versa – but this is one of them). So we don’t stay in arm’s reach – we tend to stay in bubble/fin-view. Every minute or so I glance around to look for fins and bubbles, just to make a mental map of where my buddy is. This isn’t a proof method, so now I don’t panic when I lose my buddy. I don’t assume that they’ll “just turn up” by themselves. I tend to make an educated guess as to where they might be, calmly circle around for a bit looking for them, and then make my safe ascent to meet on the surface. That is obviously not great on deeper dives, because I want to descend again, and “bounce diving” is a great way to end up with decompression issues – so on deeper dives (boat dives, generally), we stick closer and just take the hit as far as sample collection is concerned. An ascent is an ascent, and that’s it.
7) “working” dives, i.e., exercise in dives. Recreational dives for the most part (depending on conditions and goals) tend to be fairly cruisy. I tend to just lazily fin forward, looking at things, glancing at compass and gauges and buddy from time to time. That’s how I do rec dives. Working dives, with a great deal of finning and swimming (the navigation course I did – that really did me in the legs – lots of lines and triangles against a current…); dives with rough water, where a lot of energy is spent holding position; and turning over heavy rocks to find my animals; all these things are tiring, and they make you go through your air much faster. When I’ve been going to gym regularly I revel in this and don’t have too much trouble; occasionally I’ve been called to dive when I am perfectly healthy but a little unfit, and wow, I can feel the difference.
8) Long shore walks. Some of the piers I have dived have been very long; some have had vile ladders at the end of them; and many of the places we’ve dived have been a bit inaccessible to car. When it’s cold, and you’re wearing a dry suit, and the appropriate 12kgs of lead (I actually need a bit more at the moment due to my new fluffy thermals. Mmmm, fluffy thermals), you feel every step on an unstable rocky reef. After a long shore walk, take a break before you get in (unless it’s really hot. Then get in the water and float around on the surface for a bit to get your breath before descending). The last thing you want to do is descend while you’re still in oxygen debt from heavy exercise – and walking a long distance in full kit and dry-suit-appropriate lead is heavy exercise – and start guzzling from your tank.
9) Repetitive dives, multi-day diving, lots of driving.
10) Long dives. You can stay down for a very long time at three or four metres, in terms of both air and decompression limits.
Alright, so reading that, if you’re not a regular diver, it kind of sounds like I know my shit, right?
Wrong. I know that stuff. I am actually pretty comfortable in a shallow dive in cold, rough, low-vis conditions (I’m not saying I won’t get a bit cranky if, say, my dry suit floods or, as happened recently, underweighting means I get pushed around more than I expected). And given that those conditions are what many divers consider “not fun”, when I get into clearer water, deeper water, calmer water, I have a blast.
But here’s the stuff I’m a bit shaky on:
1) appropriate ascent rate. At nine metres or less, it’s not something you have to worry about. I pretty much think about going up, aim myself at the surface, vent my BC to prevent just bouncing out, and oh! Hello sunlight. For deeper diving, this is not okay. I can ascend at an appropriate rate, don’t get me wrong, but I sure as hell do not have much practice at it and there’s a lot of “Whoops! Slow down, there”.
2) You don’t have to do a safety stop (where you stop at five metres for three to five minutes to off-gas excess nitrogen, recommended for all dives deeper than nine metres), so I don’t have a lot of practice holding level at a particular depth. I’m generally on the bottom, or ascending. Again, this is something I can do, but it requires a great deal of concentration and focus on my part.
3) Air conservation. Generally air is not limiting on a four metre dive; and to be honest, bottom time is not really limiting either. We’ll get down on air before we have to worry about decompression limits, and we’ll get all our animals before we have to worry about air. I can count the number of times I have had an honest-to-God air-limited fieldwork dive on the fingers of one hand (one embarrassing situation early in my diving career still makes me wince when I think of it).
4) Bottom time for reasons of nitrogen absorption. See above. At the depths I dive, it’s just not an issue. You have to keep track of it – you would be very silly not to! – but it’s not a serious concern. The odds of exceeding Doppler limits are ridiculously low.
5) Dive computer use. I’ve got a decent, albeit secondhand, dive computer. It has a manual somewhere. It’s programmable for nitrox use. The thing is, for all the reasons I’ve described, I’ve only ever used it as a bottom timer, and on rare occasions, to monitor my ascent rate. I’m not entirely sure how to get it to do anything else (don’t worry; I’ve got a nitrox and a deep diver course coming up, and I’m going to need that baby working for those, so I’ll be hunting the manual down soonish).
6) Finally, navigation and orientation. I left this one for last because in the last year I’ve found I’m actually much better at this than I thought. I did the nav course, for one, which makes me feel a bit more confident, but even before that I surprised myself by using a combination of my compass and landmarks to find the ascent line on a boat dive without too much trouble. The fact is that on shallow shore dives, navigation isn’t a huge issue. Under piers, well, they’re going one of two ways, and if you know which way the pier projects (i.e. say, from looking at a map when you planned the dive), you know where the shore is. Even without piers, shore sloping and wave marking is pretty obvious, and if that fails, you can always surface and look for it, take a heading, and drop back down. In shallow water, that’s not particularly risky behaviour. Regardless, navigating in deeper water is something I haven’t done much.
These are things that regular boat divers, for example, will be able to do almost without thinking about it.
Here’s the other thing: the people I do most of my diving with have been doing this all their lives, and they’re mostly in their forties or fifties. Many of them have dives logged into four digits – they don’t even bother any more (I’ve lost track of the number of times one of these people have glanced at me while I’m logging my dive and gone, “Wow, you’re good! I don’t even bother any more.” See, to me, a logged dive is still a victory. Also, I like to write down all the cool things I saw).
So I don’t consider my 97 dives to be very experienced. A couple of hundred, maybe over a couple of years? I’d credit that.
For that reason, whenever I hear about someone having sixty dives and being supposedly very experienced, I just have to blink. Sixty dives? Where was I at sixty dives?! I think it was 2010, and I think it might have been the slightly evil “eastern Victoria” trip, which involved Cowes Jetty (lost buddy, poor visibility), Cape Paterson (rough! Swam in circles! The only place where I decided that it was okay to orient myself by fish as there was a shoal of tiny fry under an overhang, and they hadn’t moved when I next saw them) and the infamous Arch Rock dive in Walkerville near Wilson’s Promontory, where I famously said the words, “Hrm. Bit of a surface swim. Doesn’t look that bad,” and possibly should have been shot for that utterance as we all ended up swimming in excess of three kilometres that day before descending into the kind of rough water where I spend a lot of time pulling myself along the bottom by gripping kelp holdfasts. Got some good samples, though.
Good times, good times.
I have instructed my supervisor to slap me should I ever say the words “bit of a surface swim” and “not too bad” again. He probably won’t, but he will remind me of Arch Rock and how we all had trouble walking the next day.
Having said that, I don’t intend to dismiss the experience of someone who is justifiably proud of their sixty dives. They’re probably quite good at all those things I suck at (ascent rate, levelling off, computer use). It’s just that my standards are skewed along the lines of scientist divers, photography divers, and the Melbourne Uni club divers who go out every weekend. My bell curve in this is, perhaps, a little different from your average PADI-certified tourism diver (not that there’s anything wrong with tourism diving! I think it is an excellent thing to do! Every holiday I go on will involve diving in the future!).
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m going to be very conservative if someone tells me they are a “very experienced” diver. I think I’ll be learning how to do this better for the rest of my diving life, and I can’t imagine at what point I would be comfortable applying that label to myself.
I will say that I’m probably pretty experienced at shallow, cold, poor visibility, rough, uncomfortable dives, and wrestling recalcitrant brittle stars into ziploc bags.
