What a DiveMaster Can (and Can't) do once qualified?

[TMHeimer]

I'll give my usual take on DM--
--Make sure you want to get into the teaching aspect, especially if you will be assisting with courses.
--With PADI anyway, there are a couple of courses you can teach aside from just assisting. They are basic--like snorkeling, scuba review, etc.
--My philosophy is don't "work" unless you're paid--by the owner, not just in tips or "perks" with the shop. Working for free degrades the "professional" status that the agencies like to call it.
--Teaching on knees. While I agree that teaching neutrally is the better approach, I think it depends on the student--their comfortability in water and intention of diving regularly after certified. I figure most older instructors today were taught kneeling and they came out alright, as did I. IMHO it's not the end of the world to kneel, but I do agree neutral teaching is a lot better, and in some of the later courses I assisted on I noticed a trend toward that.

 

[JohnN]

I would like to provide a more comprehensive explanation about the legal concepts of duty of care, standard of care, standard of care of professionals, etc. However, I am at work right now and do not have the time to explain the differences properly.

Suffice it to say that a dive professional may be held to a higher standard of care than a diver who is not a dive professional.

Yepper and my (very selfish reason) for not taking a Rescue course. Of course, I'll try and help where ever I could, I just don't want the liability if things go sideways. . .(however, I was a swimming instructor through the Red Cross many years ago I don't think that would ever come up)

 

[Dogbowl]

Yepper and my (very selfish reason) for not taking a Rescue course. Of course, I'll try and help where ever I could, I just don't want the liability if things go sideways. . .(however, I was a swimming instructor through the Red Cross many years ago I don't think that would ever come up)

The Rescue course also causes me some concern, but not as much as a professional level course would. Plus, I think there are better alternatives for the DM course if a higher level of diving skills is what I'm after. Although I like a good discount myself, getting discounts on future courses or gear, if that is my main goal, is insufficient as an incentive for me to do DM.

 

[Attonine]

And there are much better and more thorough ways to get this knowledge without a DM course.

If I could do it again, I’d definitely go the tec route.

DM really is only for those looking to go the instructor route.

 

[Diver0001]

--Teaching on knees. While I agree that teaching neutrally is the better approach, I think it depends on the student--their comfortability in water and intention of diving regularly after certified. I figure most older instructors today were taught kneeling and they came out alright, as did I. IMHO it's not the end of the world to kneel, but I do agree neutral teaching is a lot better, and in some of the later courses I assisted on I noticed a trend toward that.

I know this is a bit of a side-bar but I would like to offer my opinion on this.

To me, kneeling or not kneeling during OW training has several aspects that are important.

incorrect positioning
Kneeling causes the diver to be in the incorrect position to learn a certain number of skills. Chief among those are mask clearing and AAS usage. As a certified diver you seldom clear your mask while vertical in the water column and you will probably never initiate an OOA situation while sitting stationary on the bottom in a vertical position.

This is about what I call "specificity of training". In order to train most efficiently you need to train the way you will be diving. Namely, while swimming around. Every skill taught and practiced in the context in which students will ACTUALLY be diving pays dividends in the end result.

buoyancy control
Learning buoyancy control takes time. In the OW course students don't have excessive amounts of time. There are a few instructors out there who spend up to 50 hours in confined with students but most of the diving courses include more like 5-10 hours in confined. Teaching buoyancy control in that amount of time requires a very efficient approach. Every second the student is stationary on the bottom and waiting for something to happen is time wasted that could and should be put to better use.

Moreover, issues related to buoyancy control are strongly implicated in turning incidents into accidents. This isn't just a matter of something being "better" and that the student will eventually learn it after they are certified. This is a verifiable safety issue that needs to be taken seriously.

bootstrapping
Future instructors are learning today. If we expect training in the future to be better than the training we got (not all of which was horrible but some of which was highly inefficient) then we need to set expectations early. I have the entire Jacques Cousteau DVD collection and when you look at their diving it is ... frankly ... abysmal by today's expectations. My sincere hope is that my students will look back at their training and appreciate the bar we set for them as having offered a good foundation for solid diving and that they didn't need to learn it "on the fly" after being certified.

efficiency
I've mentioned this word a couple of times already but this is the crux if the new approach. We don't have a lot of time to train newbie divers and wasting that time doing things inefficiently is what separates good instructors from bad ones, good courses from bad ones, good results from the bad, good divers from the ones we all complain about. Making every minute count is important when you don't have a lot of minutes to work with. For example, my students NEVER kneel while they are waiting for something. They wait while hovering. That's not for my ego. It's so that they are using that time "waiting" to practice a skill that they actually will need. It's all about making every minute count.

finally
Finally, I have to say that as an instructor you have your eyes focused on the end result. That result is a process. In that process there will be times that students will touch the bottom. Maybe they will even kneel on the bottom. That's not a big problem as long as whatever they are doing in that process serves to achieve the best end result possible. Going too far with "never touching the bottom" can actually work against that result by spending time on things too early or in the wrong order, which can distract the instructor from the end-result. We've been seeing this happening in recent years too with instructors who started out well but now have to spend inordinate amounts of time in confined because they are taking steps that are far too big early in training and need all of that time to fix their mistakes.

The point here being that training neutrally buoyant isn't a goal in and of itself. It must serve the goal of making training more efficient.

R..

 

[rivers]

I'm a DM in the UK, although PADI, not SSI. I pay £80/year for my dive medical and around £70 for my DM fees. I also get paid to DM, although it isn't a massive wage. My DMing basically covers some of the cost of my fun diving on a yearly basis. The amount I save on trimix more than makes up for a couple of days of DMing at most. If the shop isn't willing to pay you once you are fully qualified, find another shop to work for.

 

[Lorenzoid]

. . .

So I entered with pretty good skills, certainly more than adequate for Rec diving. However I soon found that being in very shallow water magnified deficiencies I had which weren't apparent in normal diving. I mean who spends their time in only 6' of water?

Having refined my buoyancy and positional finning while being task loaded - i.e. focused on a student rather than what I was doing translated into much better Rec skills. Had I not taken the course I wouldn't have a) had the chance to fine tune those skills b) Even known that my skills could be fine tuned to that extent.

This reminds me of a story that was related on some SB thread a long time ago. The person, who is now an experienced cave diver, was having difficulty with fine tuning her buoyancy/trim/control or something to that effect. The instructor handed her a GoPro to film another student. As I recall the story, she said that, task loaded with that camera, focused on a task that was only indirectly related to what she was having difficulty with, and intent on doing a good job, suddenly it somehow clicked and she was operating at the level she was aiming for without thinking about it. So I can appreciate how assisting with other students could help one's own skills.

 

[Lorenzoid]

I would like to provide a more comprehensive explanation about the legal concepts of duty of care, standard of care, standard of care of professionals, etc. However, I am at work right now and do not have the time to explain the differences properly.

Suffice it to say that a dive professional may be held to a higher standard of care than a diver who is not a dive professional.

There are a number of old threads debating divemaster liability where the legal basis has been discussed. A Google search ought to turn them up. The idea that someone who happens to hold a DM card could be held to a higher standard for negligence to, say, his buddy, even though he wasn't acting in a paid/professional capacity on that particular dive, is disconcerting. I don't think the theory would hold water, but stranger things have happened. Suffice it to say that, at least in the US, lawyers would leave no stone unturned. The issue of the defendant being a divemaster--even if ultimately ruled irrelevant--would almost certainly be brought to light initially and have to be dealt with by the defendant.

 

[lowflyer]

In a previous post I revealed that being a DM is a money drain for me. Many have opined on reasons they either like being a DM or consider it a waste of money and time.
I'm one of those who enjoy interacting with the students while assisting instructors and having more reasons to jump in the water.

In a post that I think is good guidance, @Marie13 posted about people paying $1600 for the PADI DM course. Those people are being fleeced it appears, even if that price includes Rescue. Locally, Rescue costs $250-$275, and DM costs $500-$700. So anyone interested should scout around.

 

[Marie13]

In a previous post I revealed that being a DM is a money drain for me. Many have opined on reasons they either like being a DM or consider it a waste of money and time.
I'm one of those who enjoy interacting with the students while assisting instructors and having more reasons to jump in the water.

In a post that I think is good guidance, @Marie13 posted about people paying $1600 for the PADI DM course. Those people are being fleeced it appears, even if that price includes Rescue. Locally, Rescue costs $250-$275, and DM costs $500-$700. So anyone interested should scout around.

No, that cost was for concurrent PADI DM and another agency’s DM course.