First, diving for a living, and being a professional in recreation diving are vastly different things. There are many people whose job includes diving (Dr. Bill comes immediately to mind). And then there people whose job consistes solely of recreational teaching/guiding. (No one at SB I can think of comes immediately to mind other than myself. Which of course does not mean they do not exist. There are people in the industry, but they are shop owners, boat owners, manufacturers, and weekend warriors. Back when I first joined SB there were a couple of people who actually were working instructors, who I guess got tired of being told how things actually were or how they should be, by people living on the mainland US. (Ignoring Florida to some degree, just because.)
because there are a bunch of divers local to me who earn a living purely from scuba diving. T
his woman for example built her business from the ground up ... and scuba is all she does. She lives and works right here, in the greater Seattle area ...
I am glad someone can make their living solely through recreational diving and nothing else in Seattle. Or I would be, but I also do not believe such a person exists. Not calling anyone out, just suggesting that there is a significant other, pension etc. backing up that "money-making" endeavor. Lots of divers are 'professionals", vanishingly few are plumbers. Working at a dive shop full time is not diving full time, neither is owning a dive shop.
Because I am a plumber, I get to deal with all the various fetishes that people who to where I am bring to diving, most of which are simply extraneous to the activity itself. (Gas planning as presented at SB comes to mind as a perfect example. I would add DIR here, but...) People who do nothing but recreational dive for a living have to handle things that simply are outside the range, and clearly, in many cases, outside the imagination of people who are erstwhile dive "professionals": instructors who do not make a living from diving, divemasters who do not carry insurance, cave divers who run into problems equalizing when doing more than two dives a day, etc. etc.
So talking about excelling in diving first has to have the requirement that they make a living in diving, because until it is what people do for a living, people can and do have all sorts of beliefs about diving, as shown by the number of frankly silly things people take seriously at SB.
That above talks directly to below in my mind
Just an FYI here. 5 year hydro's are a DOT regulation. Dive operations in the carribean are not required or even inclined to annual VIP much less 5 year hydro. Most aluminum 80's the valve is corroded to the tank. When the tank/valve is no longer serviceable they become scrap metal.
No shirt, no shoes, no VIP, no hydro......no problem.
My comments are not about diving 'skill' or "excellence", but about actually engaging in recreational diving for a living. There are plenty of people who can cook a great meal, but there are very few who can work a line in a restaurant. Seeing professional chefs working in a busy McDonalds because building up hand speed is crucial to long term success says something about the difference between "excellence" and doing things for a living. There is no excellence to prepping two garbage cans of salad a day, there is just doing it for a living. It's required, and taking a long time to do it means you never get to be a chef, excellent or not. Hand speed is completely on point, "excellence" is immaterial. What's an "excellent" garbage can of salad taste like?
And hand speed in working in recreational diving matters too. Being able to swap out/set up thirty sets of gear in a few minutes. Handling customers gear problems before they are unaware the problem happened. "Excellence" does not matter when stripping the fins off a customer getting banged against the ladder, speed does.
Crotch grabs, boob grabs, losing skin off the arms from fingernails pinched into them, mask swipes, etc. are just something a professional (rather than a "professional") has to learn to deal with without reaction. All unintentional, all just part of the job. As often as not I get these from 'professionals', because most non-"professionals" actually listen to the briefs and follow the suggestions.
We severely haze DMs here: shutting off their valve just before they go in, swapping their gear onto empty tanks, etc. etc. because a bad reaction to the unexpected is a good sign that they should be gone, because we don't want their **** splashing onto us. That hazing is certainly not 'professional' but it is absolutely necessary to weed scary people out. Probably "excellent" divers in the water, but work is work.
Getting the reg stolen from the mouth, and then getting bear hugged into immobility by an OOA diver is just something a working diver better handle simply without reaction. The reaction to my telling SB that that is what can happen in real world OOA consistently gets disbelieved. As is my suggestion that to handle this situation a professional should be able to handle a CESA from whatever depth they guide to, without a second thought, comes from working as a diver in the situation as it presents itself. Because work is work.
Plumbers don't only fix shower heads, they also run snakes through diarrhea. Because doing whatever for a living means taking it as it comes, and doing what one is paid for, not as one would like it to be.
ie, Professional vs. "Professional"
Now once one does actually do it for a living as described above, then we can talk about "excellence" because then it really does matter. Working divers train more divers in a slow year then most instructors do in a lifetime, so what we do matters far, far more. Wokring divers train hundreds of students every year. And do a thousand intro divers every year. And a thousand boat divers. And the customers come from everywhere. While we do not move,
If you wait by the
river long enough, the
bodies of your enemies will
float by. Or something like that.
But one ongoing problem is that everyone who ever gets a diving license thinks they know diving. Or they get tech instructor certified, and they know diving. Or they get cave instructor certified, and then they know diving. Or they got certifed 40 years ago, and they dive twice a year, and they know diving. I have learned from lots of things, but mostly from actually working as a diver.