Guides (DMs) getting lost

[pepperbelly]

Remember the theme from Top Gun???

Never leave your wingman?

 

[Schwob]

@Schwob,

For a brand new (at the time) DM, how much do you think you think she was simply over her head, that she had no idea getting into this how little she knew about what she didn't know, and how poorly she was for so much responsibility. I think that I may have acted just as poorly after I became a PADI DM, as I didn't learn about managing people through my training, but through real world experience. My navigation skills were probably better than most (one DM I knew had absolutely no clue as to how to use a compass. His navigation was really atrocious, and fortunately he never worked as a guide).

While I agree that dive outfits should discourage the hurry up part, they are part of the problem in that they want dive pros who are willing to accept low wages. The only way to get a steady stream of that is simply insufficient training.

Hopefully my comment is relevant to the topic at hand. I don't have a solution, as the market forces are the root cause to events described here.

Well, I do not want to quantify how much in over her head she was. I have an opinion, but I am maybe not qualified to air that publically, after all I am not that experienced either.

In a nutshell, I just think getting safely lost and recovering safely from it is not that bad in that sort of setting that it was... (In other settings (high current, or in an overhead situation, or... ) that's another story. In my case I did perceive the way she recovered as the real issue. I did not see it as safe at all and it seemed that those that then effectively chose to follow me didn't either (well OK, simple truth is it was not a choice, they could not keep up with her). So if all else was the same and she had just done this with better communication and at more reasonable speed, I don't think anybody would have minded that much. But that would have caused her to bring the group to the boat notably late. The actions observed lead me to conclude that maybe she was more incentivised to be on time then to be safe. If so, that likely of course is not by some official policy, and more by "evaluation fear" or peer pressure, fear of embarassment, not being able to adford the round of beer to the peers, who knows... (not my job to figure out the root cause and adress it) Point is, no matter what, safety needs to be first... If that was truly incentivised that way, she would not have had a reason, however flawed, to speed away like that. Of course there is fault with her, but I think not only...
Those other pressures and motivations at work, in real life do not always completely sync with the glossy printed operating principles ... nowhere... The hard part is to get them close... much harder as you point out in what iappears to be an essentially a very low paying service industry.

All that said, while I did not dive with her in March (as I soloed), I am quite sure she is much more grounded now.

A side note: Soloing the first time "out there", it is easy to realize fast that it is best not to get lost and if, because it is a busy area, check early enough so that you not so far away that in your lostness you and up taking a bearing to the wrong boat. Did not happen to me, I did pretty well, but the thought how that would suck occurred. Them boats do look similar from afar. And the names are not that easy to read (and close to the waterline) Someone just following a DM w/o directional awareness, w/o any idea of corase location and no idea of relative position and not worried about slight differences in boats that would let you tell, might very easily shoot for the wrong boat... Especially on windy enough days when they all congregate on the same general area...

 

[Vicko]

I have this wreck that I dive 3-4 times a week during the peak season. I managed to not find it one time due to high current and proceded to dive the surrounding reef for something like 20 minutes. **** happens.