Lessons learned from first time boat dives in Monterey Bay, CA

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Your story just reminds me of a current thread on "advice for diver traveling alone". You managed your buddy's major issues, but as a result, you didn't get to dive. And your skill and experience level is not high enough to be able to keep you and your son together as a team and still deal with tEL's problems.

It sounds like you did all the right things to try to set this up well for you and your son, and the addition of an even less experienced or capable third person overwhelmed your ostensible "help". You did make some mistakes (like trying to dive underweighted) but overall, you were, I think just overfaced in every direction. Doing a boat dive as your first dive in cold salt water was an error in judgment, but I would have expected the dive pros through whom you arranged the DM to have counseled you on that.
 
I would like to know too

Me, three. We are within a couple months of going on a Monterey boat dive. It would be good to know this.

- Bill

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Doing a boat dive as your first dive in cold salt water was an error in judgment, but I would have expected the dive pros through whom you arranged the DM to have counseled you on that.

Really? I'm just a novice, but my experience has been pretty much that the 'dive pros' take all comers that are in any way apparently qualified.

Why is a boat dive in cold salt water more challenging than any other dive in cold water?

My experience with DMs has been mostly good but some are clearly not as good as others. Maybe some of them shouldn't be considered 'professionals', at least not at the time they were interacting with me. And I am sure that I am not a perfect client.

My biggest complaint is that they all seem to expect people to not be a buddy with anyone, they just expect you to follow them, which, for my first 30 dives, I happily did. It took ScubaBoard for me to find out how important it is to ALWAYS pay attention to your buddy, first!

- Bill
 
TSandM is absolutely right.

Doing a boat dive as your first dive in cold salt water is, in my opinion, most definitely an error in judgment. Personally, I would extend this to say that getting on a boat as your first dive to an environment that requires completely different exposure protection is sketchy at best. Meaning, if you are a cold water diver and you are going to dive the tropics the first time, it is probably not that wise to do a 100ft wall dive of a boat until you've got your weighting figured out.

I like to sort out my weighting requirements in a reasonably benign dive (which usually means a shallow shore dive in a protected area) before I jump on a boat.

Really? I'm just a novice, but my experience has been pretty much that the 'dive pros' take all comers that are in any way apparently qualified.

They probably do take all comers that are "apparently qualified". What constitutes "qualified" or even "apparently qualified" is not clear.

Personally, I do not know of any way to judge some random divers ability to dive other than to go diving with them. If a dive pro (don't know what level of competence a "dive pro" is meant to have) is taking a guest on a boat in Monterey for a first dive in cold water, they are doing so with all kinds of unknowns.

So the net of this is, just because "dive pros" do something doesn't mean it makes sense.

Why is a boat dive in cold salt water more challenging than any other dive in cold water?

Any boat, particularly in the ocean, adds a lot of time pressure to a diver. You need to be squared away before you jump in the water. If you jump in and and only then, you discover that you have issues (like being under-weighted), you will have several problems:
  • if there are big seas you will have one heck of a time trying to get sorted out. Trying to sort out issues on a pitching and rocking boat or even worse, in the water. Well, lets just say that this kind of experience is memorable. And not in a good way.
  • if you are supposed to be diving as a group along with the other divers and lead by a dive leader, you will now either be keeping everyone waiting or if they descend without you, you are now separated from the group and more importantly, your dive leader, at the very beginning of the dive.
  • you will either be wasting bottom time to sort out those issues or you decide to run your dive for the same amount of bottom time as the other divers, those other divers will wind up waiting for you on the boat in unpleasant conditions.

Cold water boat dives only exacerbate the issues as thick exposure protection will obviously require a lot more ballast. Of course, you can aim to overweight yourself so you will not have to deal with being to buoyant at any time during the dive. But this is a really bad idea in case of emergencies. (Those divers that we read about occasionally... the ones that run out of gas, make it all the way to the surface and then sink to the bottom and drown. I can't think of how else that is possible other than the diver was over weighted.)

And btw, the first dive off of boats in Monterey is usually the deeper/more challenging of the two dives. There is no "warm up" dive where in you can get yourself situated. So now walk through the scenario. You are on your first boat dive. You might be a little or a lot sea sick. You jumped in the water only to find yourself under-weighted. You and your annoyed buddy climb back into the boat (which is not trivial given the amount of gear you have on) and you sort out your issues. Hopefully you fix the issues on the first try. The group has decided to go down without waiting for you. You are panting pretty good now having jumped in and climbed out of the boat. You fix whatever issues you have and you and your buddy jump back in the water. After going through all that, you are now going to descend into the deeper/more challenging dive of the day.

Are you having fun yet?

My experience with DMs has been mostly good but some are clearly not as good as others. Maybe some of them shouldn't be considered 'professionals', at least not at the time they were interacting with me. And I am sure that I am not a perfect client.

Are you aware of how much or how little experience or proficiency is required to become a DM?

My biggest complaint is that they all seem to expect people to not be a buddy with anyone, they just expect you to follow them, which, for my first 30 dives, I happily did. It took ScubaBoard for me to find out how important it is to ALWAYS pay attention to your buddy, first!
- Bill

The approach of "everyone dives with a group lead by a DM" is common in the tropics where the vis is usually incredibly good. It is easier in those conditions for a dive leader to keep visual track of the various divers participating on a dive. I don't personally think it is a good approach but I understand why they do it.

In any location where anything greater than 15ft of vis is considered decent, the above approach just does not work. Trying to track a group of people with 15-20ft of vis is an exercise in futility. As far as I know, none of the boats in Monterey send a dive leader down with the dive group. The expectation here is that you have a buddy and you guys dive together. Some boats do allow solo diving also.

Roughly 2/3 of my dives are with one buddy. The other 1/3 has been with a group of three (me and two others). Diving with a group of 3 is about the limit of what I can handle - and that is with 3 people that have a decent of amount of experience, training and dives with each other. I've tried diving with groups of 4. In each and every occasion, I found the experienced to be FUBAR.
 
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Personally, I wouldn't want to do a Monterey boat dive until I was (a) comfortable shore diving conditions like Monterey and (b) comfortable boat diving in general.

Monterey boat diving, in my opinion, is where you want to be at the level where a lot of things are happening in your brain on autopilot, freeing your attention for more pressing matters. The dive masters are only going in if you need help (except on rare occurrences where they decide to dive with you as a buddy, for whatever reason -- i've had this happen), so it's up to you and your group to know what's going on.

Add to that that depending on the conditions, if you don't descend exactly together, you can easily lose your buddy/group in ten seconds or less, with small odds of finding them, and as alluded to, that if you're not prepared, you may be seasick (Monterey is the only boat diving so far where I need medication --- just because you didn't on other boat dives doesn't mean you might not here).

Taken together, Monterey boat diving can be quite a bit more challenging than you may be used to. I've had several boat dives in Monterey that I "got through" without really enjoying them --- but at least they were a learning experience.

And I got certified in Monterey, so it's not like Monterey was a foreign experience -- it's where I "grew up."
 
I agree with the two post above. Monterey boat dive is definitely on the challenge side. The condition often has combination, if not all of these: foggy sky, choppy sea, cold water, low viz, dark, current and surge. Added thick exposure suit, large amout of weight. The whole has to NOT be taken lightly.
 
Thanks for the info on the difficulty of boat diving -- that is helpful. I see what you are saying.

The rest of the comments are helpful, too.

So, how much experience / training does a "DM" need? What are they "supposed" to have?

- Bill
 
Mistake #3+
a) When finding myself underweighted I of course should have returned to the boat to get more weight b) the DM should have permitted time and opportunity to do a weight check knowing this was our first cold water ocean dive in our dry suit and c) doing 2 good shore dives from Monterey Beach the following day, I had wished that someone would have told us that being new to Monterey Bay diving, starting out with a beach dive before a boat dive would be a MUCH better and gentler way of being introduced into this unique water environment.

I'm pretty sure there's some verbiage about diving the same conditions you were certified in... everyone we get that asks in the NorCal section we usually tell to go to the bunny slopes (Breakwater) to adjust to the conditions and figure out the weighting.

How did you do your research/prep for this trip?

PS Body = Buddy? I really hate seeing that word in dive reports....
 
Why is a boat dive in cold salt water more challenging than any other dive in cold water?

Depends on the boat. If it's your boat or you own it for the day, boat diving is easier.

If you're just a passenger and the boat has a schedule (2 tank dive @ 8AM and another at 1PM for example), there isn't a lot of time for unplanned stuff like a buoyancy check, adjusting weights or anything else and boat diving is more demanding.

Nobody cares if you take two hours to get in the water on a shore dive.

flots.

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So, how much experience / training does a "DM" need? What are they "supposed" to have?

That depends on whether the DM's training facility is training the DM for their own use, or just as a class.

Shops that train DMs for their own use typically have much higher standards.

However the short answer is that you can start the PADI DM class with 40 dives. 40 dives is just enough to think you're "really good" and not enough to have found out that you're still an accident looking for a place to happen.

flot.
 
Well, I think you found out what some of the challenges of doing a boat dive as your first dive in a new environment can be!

For one thing, it's hard to fix weighting issues, because you may have to get back on the boat to do it. Getting back on the boat is often the hardest part of boat diving anywhere. In addition, having to do so puts you off schedule with the rest of the divers, or with your guide if you have one.

Second is the whole profile issue. Unless you are diving somewhere where all the dives are shallow, you'll generally be doing the deepest dive first (and in Monterey, the deep structures are deep dives). So now you're in an unfamiliar environment, with unfamiliar exposure protection, on a site which may not offer any conservative options.

Third, boat dives may be dives where navigation is important, if the boat is anchoring and you are expected to return to it (as my experience with the pinnacle-type dives in Monterey has been). In low viz, and on an unfamiliar site where landmarks aren't useful, this can be a challenge.

Fourth, boat diving involves direct descents and ascents, and to keep a team together requires either a shared strategy of using the anchor line, or good buoyancy control and awareness.

There are some places in the world where there is effectively no shore diving. There, you pretty much have to have yourself squared away before you dive, and I think people contemplating diving in such places should have some experience in at least the same water temperatures and conditions.

I think you kind of knew you were biting off a big chunk, which is why you arranged for your own DM, and the shop did not serve you well by putting another, even more inexperienced diver in with the two of you. And I think they should have suggested a quick dip at the Breakwater, before booking you onto a boat. That's what I would expect a responsible dive shop to do. I don't get the feeling that you would have objected to that at all, had it been proposed.

All you can say about your day of diving is that no one got hurt, and a lot of lessons were learned. Too bad an expensive boat trip had to be spent learning them, though.
 
Reading this thread makes me realize I really need to get down to Monterey and get on a boat.
Monterey conditions are nice and the boats are great.

Going to Monterey is a relief from some of the conditions we have to endure up here on the north coast.

Going to Southern California is my version of a poor mans tropical dive vacation.
 
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