The PADI Instructor Exam is now underway in Sydney. There are 10 candidates in all, with Matt, John and Flavio having completed their PADI Instructor Development Course at United Divers Wollongong.

All have done well so far in completing their theory exams, and I wish them all the best of success in the remainder of the weekend.

A few years back I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Dr Sylvia Earle. A wonderful speaker with a real passion for the ocean, Dr Earle has recently made a presentation at TED Prize where she showed beautiful imagery of the oceans - and shocking stats on the dangers facing it.

At the core of her presentation is a wish that we as a society get together to protect Planet Ocean - the heart of life on this planet.

“Business as usual means that in 50 years there may be no coral reefs”

(Thanks to Doug Stetner for the link)

We commenced a PADI Instructor Development Course with INDEPTH Scuba in Batemans Bay yesterday.  There are four candidates - Josh, Gaz, Lara and Guy - who are excited to be starting down the paths of becoming dive instructors.

The program is a 9 day fulltime program, and is a live in program at INDEPTH Scuba’s wonderful lodge in Batemans Bay.

This morning we’re heading up to the pool to get into the first of the confined water teaching presentations, and also to work on diving skills.

Good luck to Lara, Guy, Josh and Gaz.

I received recently the Oct-Dec 2008 edition of Alert Diver, published by DAN Asia Pacific. As usual I found this magazine to have a wealth of articles about diving and diving safety.  Receiving Alert Diver is just one of the benefits of being a member of DAN - an organisation that every diver should be part of.

One article in particular that I appreciated was 2003 Diving Fatalities: A review of the regional diving-related fatalities recorded by DAN AP for 2003.  This article detailed a range of diving and snorkelling related deaths in Australia, NZ, Thailand, the  Philipines and Mirconesia.  As a breakdown, the following fatalities were recorded:

• Australia - 9 scuba & 11 snorkelling
• New Zealand - 12 scuba & 2 snokelling
• Palau - 1 scuba
• Philipines - 3 scuba
• Thailand - 2 scuba & 1 snorkelling

There are many interesting things in this article.  The apparent disporportionate number of snorkelling deaths in Australia is down to 2 factors

1. The enormous number of snorkelling tourists visiting the Great Barrier Reef; and,
2. Unavailability of reported data in many AP locations

The main area of interest for me however lay in looking into the brief outlines of each scuba death in Australia.  One thing in particular was strongly apparent to me.

In 5 of the 9 scuba deaths in Australia in 2003 the deceased had become separated from the buddy/group prior to dying.

Not only did these 5 people die, but they died alone.

Now its impossible to say whether they might have survived if they had not become separated, but I would strongly assert that their chances of survival would have been significantly higher had they not been alone.

Now please understand, I don’t believe that these people were trained solo divers conducting solo dives.  I believe that through inattention and probably through the often poor observance of buddy diving procedure they became inadvertently separated.

I believe that there is an important lesson herein - buddy diving procedures need to be followed by divers much more stringently than they often are.  I stress buddy procedures on all courses I teach, particularly for Open Water Diver (learn-to-dive courses), but also on PADI Instructor Development Courses.

For other dive instructors reading this, please consider this data, and think about how you teach buddy procedures.  Do you just talk about it and practice it during certain skills (BWRAF, AAS), or do you make it a feature of all dives, even confined water (pool) dives?  Do you get people to swim back and forth as a buddy team in the pool, communicating regularly?  Do you go around checking peoples gauges, or do you set guidelines for buddies to check with each other, then check-in with you, and then reinforce that behaviour?

Do you, as an instructor, do a pre-dive safety check with a buddy and role-model good behaviour, or do you practice the “do as I say, not as I do” method?

For all divers, when was the last time you did a pre-dive safety check with a buddy?  Do you communicate regularly with your buddy or team throughout a dive, or do you follow the “same ocean, same time” behaviour that seems to typify a lot of diving?

I guess that 9 deaths (8 if you ignore the one that a coroner has deemed not to be accidental) is a relatively small number in the context of the number of divers diving throughout Australia every year.  But when one of those is a friend, family member, acquaintance or perhaps buddy its terrible. For 5 of them to have died alone is even more tragic.

Divers, unless you’re trained and certified as a solo diver and are diving according to good solo diving principles, please emphasise the buddy system.  Apart from anything else, it will give you someone to talk with about what a great time you had.

We’ve just finished day 4 of a PADI Instructor Development Course at United Divers Wollongong.

This is a small program run over a full time, 9 day schedule.  With one candidate, Matt, undertaking the IDC, and another, Richard, completing his IDC Staff Instructor Course, we’ve got plenty of time to explore many aspects of dive instruction in a lot of detail.

To date, Matt has completed a variety of assessments of his ability to teach confined water skills, impart knowledge through knowledge development presentations, and conduct open water dives.  He of course has more to do.

On Wednesday, Matt will also join in on the free PADI Emergency Oxygen Specialty Instructor course that is included in PADI IDCs conducted at United Divers.

Good luck to Matt and Richard for the rest of each of their programs.