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Geez, apparently I gave the wrong impression. First, I will dive with anyone, I certainly do not require a level of experience or skill before you can dive with me. Second, I feel EXTREMELY fortunate that when I my son got certified, I got a (pretty much) permanent dive buddy. Third, trust me, I had to improve ten-fold from when I first started to reach the level of horrible. But I did take a gazillion dive courses thinking that would make me skilled. Then I found out that skill comes with diving and diving and diving and diving. Now that I have over 500 dives, I am somewhat good enough to not constantly worry about my trim or buoyancy.
However, I was always conscious of the environment and tried as hard as I could to follow my one constant dive philosophy - "do not touch the wildlife and hope the wildlife does not touch me"
The point of my opening post was to point out that most divers who do not have the skills because they dive infrequently, really do not care about acquiring the skills. Many divers think standing on coral, touching coral or kicking coral is no big deal. They think it will grow back just like that branch I clipped off my tree in my front yard.
What they obviously overlook is that the coral may take decades or longer to grow back and with no reef, there will be no fish.
As for fish ID, well, it is just my personality to know what I am looking at so I bought a few of Paul Humann's books. When I see something I do not recognize, I look the sucker up. I am always finding new things - for example, my last trip I saw two slipper lobsters. A first for me and I had no idea what they were.
And yes, I took GUE at a time when I had no business even trying to perform skills that were well above my capabilities but I did meet some really nice, very highly skilled divers as well as meeting a ton of "nose-up-in-the-air" DIR divers who thought the rest of us should just stay out of the water. Well to them I say, you can have the caves and cold water springs, I will stick to open water where there are fish to see.
You're only reveling the tip of the iceberg. Inexperienced divers do not understand the mistakes that they're making because often their instructors were too inexperienced to have learned about that from the inexperience Course Director, despite the fact that everyone involved thought that they knew what they were doing....
A while back I read a very interesting interview in "The Wrong Stuff", a Slate feature by Kathryn Schulz:
Into Thin Error: Mountaineer Ed Viesturs on Making Mistakes. It's a fascinating interview, and I highly recommend reading it. At the moment, however, there is one sentence from it that I'd like to bring out:
Making a skilled-enough diver takes several things. First, they need to know that there's something to learn. Then they need a desire to learn it. And finally they need the practice/experience to acquire it.When you're less experienced, you don't even know about the mistakes you're making.
The problem you apparently encounter often with divers from different locales is that nobody told them there was more they might need to learn. In your case, it's quarry divers coming to open salty seas and not having the skills and knowledge to dive around coral. In a quarry diver's case, it's warm water divers showing up without cold and silt-bottom experience and messing up everyone's viz. Everything looks obvious in hindsight, but how are they supposed to know what it is they don't know.
...
Not just "poorly" experienced divers destroy coral-
Water temperature is the biggest killer of reef on the planet, so getting off fossil fuels would be the first priority to save reefs.........fusion reaction is needed, oil and fossil fuel companies hate the idea, "they" try now to slow it's induction.
BP, Mobil, Shell, etc has killed so much more coral then all the divers that have lived or ever will live.
Dear Carribean Diver who's poo has no smell. I only say that for the dig on quarry/mudhole divers. We mudholers hear a phrase repeated over and over. "If you can dive here, you can dive any ware". We do not enjoy the blue warm water with the wonderful viz and abundant life often, but we use the quarries to make sure we have it down when we arrive. Diving with silt is way more difficult than simply not touching the reef. Being aware that a movement you make near the bottom will affect silt gives you skills you Salty Dawgs know little about. To me the issue is how to get it across to the "ReefKiller" that they are doing something that needs to stop. ClayJar made some fantastic points that I will be using...leading by example. But there are some case where direct and immediate ass chewing has got to happen. I was recently in Key Largo diving with a gentleman who was in his 60's and claimed to have been diving for 40 years. He took a camera down with him and we (mudholers) observed him laying on the reef. Using beautiful purple tube sponges to reposition himself for a closer shot, snapping off chunks of coral and stirring up so much sand that all you could do was flee and hope that a barracuda would handle it. Later, on the boat I was trying to figure out how to approach him. I spoke to a crew member who simply shook their head and said "*******" under his breath. Finally in a conversation with another diver I was able to bring up (loudly) not touching the reef. He knew I was aiming my comments at him, to which he replied, "I get my best shots laying on the coral". I asked him if it mattered at all to him that he was killing the reef. He said "back when I was certified we use to bring that stuff up to the boat for souvenirs". I explained with a sh*ty tone that I didn't appreciate him screwing it up for the next generation of divers. He laughed and went on about his business. Not one crew member said anything and neither did the captain. Not being sure if I was out of line, I retreated. I figured somebody else on the boat would have jumped in and said something. Nothing. And there were several experienced salt water divers on that boat. I can say that my quarry training and trainers drilled into our heads "touch or take nothing, leave only bubbles". I have to assume from this that people trained in salty water need an additional course in Environmental Awareness!!! I am only kidding. I do however think there should be less fear from all of us to jump someones sh*t for causing damage.