Divers vs Underwater Tourists

There are some recent threads regarding personal responsibility and the newer diver and that is what caused me to start this thread.

If you are a new diver and only dive in tropical locales on vacation you are an underwater tourist not a diver and you should hire a DM to be your buddy (and only your buddy) on every dive.

There are quarries, lakes, whatever reasonably close to most people. If you are a diver, new or otherwise, you will take advantage of these to learn to dive in addition to your tropical dives while on vacation. You are a diver and are responsible for yourself whether you are new or not.

This is taking personal responsibility for your own actions. You can't change the way the dive industry is operated. You can't change PADI or the practices of tropical operators. You can't learn to dive and be considered a diver if you only dive a few times a year on vacation.

If everyone either put in the time actually diving or simply hired a personal DM as buddy many of the needless accidents we hear about would be avoided without hoping that someone else will make up for your lack of personal responsibility.

Personally, I think it's silly for people to think of themselves as divers and to have an industry tout them as such when they are actually just underwater tourists. I got on a horses back once and rode around for a while. I don't consider that I'm a horse rider or that I know anything about riding horses. In the dive world...I'm a diver!

I'm all for DM's and Instructors and charters being professional but the way the industry is put together it's just amazing that every other underwater tourist makes it out alive.

If anyone disagrees or has additional comments I guess this post will turn into a thread.

I'm a new diver, took almost 3 weeks to become one, I feel I had a great instructor, and I get most of what you are saying, but the pretentious, condescending tone of your post leaves little to be desired.
Sorry to say mate, but I had to earn my cert and consider myself a new diver, and not a tourist even with less than 15 dives, and I have been with an experienced DM that got in trouble and I responded to his yell for help, everything turned out well in the end, but like most things, new people make mistakes, and complacency haunts the experienced.

I'm trying to decide if this post is a joke or not. It's so ludicrous that at first I thought it a joke but now I'm not so sure.

So unless you dive in a quarry, lake, or somewhere close to you, you're not a diver? Interesting thought. Well, I have a quarry within a few miles of my home but the vis is usually bad and there really isn't much to see. There is a river within walking distance but even Jacques Cousteau wouldn't have dove in it. I guess I could drive to the coast but I've dove off the coast of NC enough.

So now I guess I'm just a pretend diver cause I pretty much just dive on my vacations to the tropics. There sure were a lot of pretend divers with me. Or should I say "underwater tourist". I usually get in about 60 to 75 pretend dives a year and I have yet to need someone to rescue me or show me around.

All I can say I guess is that if it wasn't for all of us "pretend divers", the dive industry would last maybe a few months at best and then fold cause I don't think there are enough of you "real divers" to support it for very long.

Of course it's all in ones perspective I would think. Maybe you have to dive under the ice in Antarctica or do the Andrea Doria to be a real diver.

BDSC:

I'm trying to decide if this post is a joke or not. It's so ludicrous that at first I thought it a joke but now I'm not so sure.

So unless you dive in a quarry, lake, or somewhere close to you, you're not a diver? Interesting thought. Well, I have a quarry within a few miles of my home but the vis is usually bad and there really isn't much to see. There is a river within walking distance but even Jacques Cousteau wouldn't have dove in it. I guess I could drive to the coast but I've dove off the coast of NC enough.

So now I guess I'm just a pretend diver cause I pretty much just dive on my vacations to the tropics. There sure were a lot of pretend divers with me. Or should I say "underwater tourist". I usually get in about 60 to 75 pretend dives a year and I have yet to need someone to rescue me or show me around.

All I can say I guess is that if it wasn't for all of us "pretend divers", the dive industry would last maybe a few months at best and then fold cause I don't think there are enough of you "real divers" to support it for very long.

Of course it's all in ones perspective I would think. Maybe you have to dive under the ice in Antarctica or do the Andrea Doria to be a real diver.

Click to expand...

It doesn't matter where you get the dives in. If you are getting 60 or more dives a year in then you are a diver who is experienced enough to be responsible for yourself. If you just got certified and only do 5 dives a year in the tropics you are probably an underwater tourist.

Sounds like chest thumping bravado to me, but what do I know, I am new to scuba myself.

At what number dive do you get the promotion to "Real Diver" from "Underwater Tourist"?

Jax Teller:

At what number dive do you get the promotion to "Real Diver" from "Underwater Tourist"?

Click to expand...

When you and your buddy can plan a dive and not need a DM to make you safe. You can have 10 dives if they are current and you dive within your comfort range. If you have 100 dives and haven't been diving in 10 years and now only dive 5 times a year you're probably an underwater tourist.

If what one is actually doing is touring underwater with a DM responsible for your safety why would the title underwater tourist bother someone?

My point is not about whether someone is a real diver or not. It about whether someone ever becomes competent enough to be responsible for themselves or not.

If you never dive enough to be competent why would you consider them to be a diver? It does them a disservice to treat them like a competent diver and to convince them that they are a diver.

Using my example of riding a horse. It would be doing me a disservice to consider that I'm a horse rider and to treat me as such. If I'm around a horse I do need someone to make sure I'm not going to break my neck. Just because I was on a horse once doesn't make me a horse rider.

Wow, you seem to have got a lot of people's backs up with this thread!

I think there is a world of possibility between your first assertion:
"If you are a new diver and only dive in tropical locales on vacation you are an underwater tourist not a diver and you should hire a DM to be your buddy (and only your buddy) on every dive."

and your subsequent statement that:
"You are a diver and are responsible for yourself whether you are new or not."

I agree wholeheartedly with the second and think that while the first may be right in quite a few cases, it's not correct in all. I'm still a pretty new diver, learned to dive in warm(ish) water and have done most (but not all) of my diving in similar locales overseas. That said, if I want to dive with any sort of regularity/frequency I know I'll need to get the experience to dive local, and have been attempting to do so. However, from the start, I also recognised that being a qualified diver (even only PADI OW, much as I recognise that the course doesn't really qualify you to be an independent diver under ideal circumstances, much less be able to dive under other conditions) meant taking responsibility for myself, my buddy and other divers as far as I was able. On one of our OW certification dives, my fellow student and 'buddy' had a genuine OOA emergency -- partly down to the fact that she was breathing a good deal faster than I was (nervous, uncomfortable underwater, lacking confidence) and that the instructor had asked me for my air not that long ago and I was still on 100 bar. I didn't know WHAT was going on (was this some sort of extra unscheduled drill??) but responded to her signals and we did an AAS ascent followed by me attempting to orally inflate her BCD on the surface since she was out of air, the instructor surfacing a few seconds later and taking over, and me going "so *** was that, exactly??"

As a still-very-inexperienced diver I would tend towards hiring a DM/instructor to accompany me on every dive, particularly when conditions fall outside my comfort zone or range of prior experience, such as at a new site. Frankly I think this is sensible rather than over-cautions; it's going to take a very long time before I just jump in the water at a new site with no questions asked and no experienced diver on hand!! However, I do consider myself a diver-in-training and not merely an 'underwater tourist'; my aim is to learn from every dive and increase my experience so that I become more capable of taking responsibility for my own safety and that of my buddy, and eventually become experienced enough to deal with (more/most) unexpected situations that might arise while diving. Yes, there are probably plenty of cowboys out there who think they've got an OW card and that's all they need to do whatever the hell they want; yes, they ought to think again. But not everyone's like that, and that's probably where you risk treading on toes by lumping everyone into the same basket. (I'm not offended personally; I'd rather be classed as an n00b tourist and stay safe than behave like a cowboy... but I do try not to be either!)

Example in point: I now feel I'd be confident to dive familiar sites under conditions I've previously experienced, with buddy whom I feel is competent and confident to dive the same. This weekend I'm diving with someone I really would class as 'underwater tourist'; we're getting an instructor to accompany us, because there is no way I feel capable of managing an inexperienced, out-of-practice diver on my own, even on an easy shallow shore dive at a site I've previously dived. Call me stupidly cautious; I'll do what I think is required to stay safe!

I don't even know how to respond to this thread.....