was amazed. What a cluster fuck. It was so peacful and serene just a few minutes ago and now the barbarians broke down the gates, littering the white sandy beach with their brunch buffet bloated bodies. This was truly a brutal display of tourism.
The Infamous Resort Course, Assault on the Reef and Breaking Rules
Teaching scuba diving in the Caribbean is a different ball game than teaching in the States or England or South America. In the Islands you don’t get the luxury of time to teach an open water course. You have three days to cram everything down the tourists’ throats: Academics and dive tables, pool sessions, four open water dives and a final exam. You may teach a few advanced classes. Once in a while a rescue diver course may come along. As for divemaster, I only taught it twice during the seven years I spent in the islands. By far, the majority of instruction was conducting the infamous Resort Course. This is the crash course in scuba diving. A brief lecture on the basics; Don’t hold your breath, don’t shoot up to the surface, this is your regulator to breathe, these are your fins, not flippers, to swim and don’t stand on the goddamn coral! You’ll do so many resort courses that you’ll feel your sanity slipping at times. At the same time, the experience you gain from teaching the resort course is absolutely invaluable.
If you want to teach in the islands be prepared to bend and, at times, break the rules. If your a “by the book” scuba instructor then stay home. It’s not that resort dive operations go out of the way to break the rules, it’s just that sometimes it’s going to happen. I don’t care what scuba agency you teach under, you will break the rules at one time or another. Check this out. Here’s how it goes down:
You have an instructor or two call in sick. Maybe one is terribly hung over and the other’s coked out. Yes, like in cocaine. There are nineteen tourists with clueless grins plastered acrcoss their faces that signed up for the resort course and it’s just you and another instructor. That’s ten students for one instructor and nine for the other. The ratio, at least when I was teaching in the islands, was six students per one instructor. The dive operatation is on a schedule. The dive boat has to be back at the dock to pick up the certified divers for the last dive of the day. Breaking down the groups to meet the ratio and taking one group down and having the other groups wait on the boat would not be feasable with the time crunch. So you and the other instructor take them all in. Take them all down to thirty feet and hope that you bring every one of them back alive.
Then there is the cardinal rule in scuba instruction: Never leave a student unattended at the surface of the water and never leave a student unattended underwater. This will happen. There you are, twenty five, thirty feet under water with your group of resort divers and everything is going fine. You watch them like a hawk. Everyone is giving you the “OK” sign. Suddenly panic in one of the divers eyes. His eyes turn as big as golf balls. The bastard gives you the out of air sign. But you know he has plenty of air because you just checked it a few minutes ago. The shithead is hyperventilating. He is now close to full blown panic. You swim to him at full speed. It’s too late. He bolts to the surface, ripping his regulator out of his mouth and tearing his mask off his face. You grab him while at the same time you signal to your group to stay where they are. They do, However, their buoyancy is terrible and they kick and bounce off the coral like pin balls. The reef is assaulted. It’s terrible, you can hear the tiny, living organisms screaming as they die. But you can’t worry about that now, you have to take control of your panicked diver. You slow his ascent, hoping he doesn’t get a lung expansion injury. You stuff his regulator back in his mouth. As you’re slowing his ascent you look down to check your other divers. That’s when you see one of the divers, the two hundred and eighty six pound beast of a lady, floating to the surface. Only she’s not in a panic. She somehow just unhooked her eighteen pound weight belt. “Oh fuck,” you say to yourself. “This is really going south now.” You have to stay focused and deal with the lesser of two evils. You get the panicked son of a bitch to the surface and inflate his BCD. You calm him down and signal the boat captain. You tell the diver to swim back to the boat in a calm manner. Always sound like you have total control over the situation. Even make a joke of it by saying something like, “Hey, you just scared all the fish away down there!”
You keep looking down to the other students, who now are wondering what the hell happened to their instructor. You reach your fat student who is bobbing up and down at the surface like a gigantic cork. She has to go back to the boat because there is no way in hell she can get back down without her weight belt. You tell her to just relax and swim slowly, the captain will keep his eye on her. Finally you go back down and regroup with your students. Now you can finish the dive. And then you end the dive guiding the students back to the boat knowing full well that you left them all unattended at one time or another. You ponder this while lugging back the eighteen pound weight belt.
Veronica H.
VIDSS dive operation was a revolving door. The turnover rate for instructors was high due to the amount of work you had to do and the volume of ugly and bazaar tourists you had to deal with. The average instructor lasted about two and a half to six months. VIDSS was the epitome of a cattle dive shop. It was just plain crazy.
I hadn’t been on the island very long when two other divers joined the ranks of VIDSS. Erin, who was a divemaster, came from California too. She was young, maybe twenty one or twenty two, and full of spunk. As a divemaster for VIDSS she couldn’t teach, so she acted as an Assistant Instructor until the dive shop could send her to an instructor course over in St. John when one opened up. Erin fit right in with the rest of us. She had that typical instructor slash divemaster personality; Adventurous and fun.
About a week after Erin arrived Dan, Erin and I were kicking back in the Tutu slum when we heard the growl of a safari bus. It was Marty the Jew with the other new instructor. Then the dumb son of a bitch starts honking his horn like we didn’t hear his ratty engine coming down the driveway. I opened the front door and a petite girl with short brown hair jumps out of the safari bus and grabs her dive gear from one of the empty rows of benches in the back. Marty gave a wave and backed out of the driveway blowing gray blue smoke from his dog turd out of the car window.
“Come on in,” Dan said.
She is really cute.
“I’m Dan and this is Erin and Eric.”
“Hi, I’m Veronica H.” She said shaking our hands.
“How do you like the place?” Erin said gesturing with her hand.
Veronica H. just stood there for a moment slowly looking around and then she said with a half smile, “This place is a real shit hole.”
“I said the same thing.” I made eye contact with her. She was really cute.
“Wait until you hear the goddamn goats up on top of the roof during the middle of the night,” Dan said, looking up.
“Goats?” Veronica asked.
“No, it’s not goats,” I said. “It’s the Chupacabra.” Veronica looked at me with a puzzled look for just a few seconds then started to laugh. That’s when I noticed her tongue ring. I almost melted. I needed a beer to compose myself. Veronica H. was hired to teach diving on one of the Princess cruise ships. VIDSS was the dive operation that supplied dive instructors for a fleet of ocean liners along with the Raddison Diamond.
Veronica H. settled in as best as she could in that rat nest. Later, we all went out for a few beers at a little bar down on the corner. We got shit faced. It all turned into a blur. I know the local lady behind the bar was getting annoyed with us because she stopped serving us rum and beer. I think she should have cut us off a little sooner because when we got back to the Tutu slum, I found myself
