Where's Mona ?

What is a dive professional? a Dive professional is someone certified anywhere between divemaster, open water instructor and further up. Then you get freediving professionals who are either instructors or safety divers for freediving competitions.

So, you are a diver or you know someone in the field who works as a dive professional and all that you see on social media is selfies on boats, that bikini or boardshorts kind of lifestyle, blue, flat waters and a killer tan! There’s no need to wear shoes to work or flip-flops will take the cake for appropriate work attire, they will be kicked aside somewhere during the day anyway!

Working as a dive professional is a passion, it’s a lifestyle. You enter this industry as a dive master or an instructor. As an instructor, you are passionate about introducing people to the underwater world; you want to teach them about diving terms, maybe help them get over the fear of water and you are the first person to teach them about the ocean and diving responsibly. The list for instructors goes on and on.

As a divemaster, you know dive briefings off by heart and you know almost every fish species in your location by size and colour. You can guide that dive site with your eyes shut and you can almost suss out the diver’s level of experience just by shaking his or her hand and by knowing how to listen to them; in this industry you really need some proper people skills. You can fix anything, you can hear an air leak from a mile away and before you get to it you already know where it’s coming from!

Taking people for snorkel lessons are just as rewarding, it’s the first step to getting someone in the water, people take care of what they love and if you can teach people to love the ocean they will also take care of it. Guiding snorkel tours is just as great! Mostly you take people on tours who are not too familiar with ocean life so hearing them squeal and laugh through their snorkel or eagerly spitting their snorkel out to ask a question is like food for the soul!

For some, it is new islands and locations by the season and for others, they are more than happy to just show and teach people about their home waters. It’s sunrise and sunsets at sea, it’s a supportive community as everybody works more or less the same hours and by the end of a season, you are as tight as a family. When it gets too hot you can quickly run down to the beach for a swim or just jump off the boat, it depends on your location. You try and keep life simple and more or less every day is different.

After diving the same spot for days in a row you could be rewarded with some surprise visitors like Manta Rays, Mobula Rays, Turtles and on the odd occasion a shark passing by. If you guide shark dives or any other dives with a particular animal in the location after a successful day you are pretty much the best human to dive this planet, things run smoothly, the day flies by and you end the day with beers and friends sharing stories with happy and tired hearts.

It looks and sounds like the endless summer eh? Well, it surely is but just like any job it has it’s moments and tough times. Behind the flip-flop tan, sun-bleached hair or salty, knotty curls there are some pretty big misconceptions about the work that we do.

During peak season it is 12/14/maybe even 16-hour days and that is not the “odd day” a week; it can be days in a row. When peak season slams you go “balls to the walls” and you work your little heart out. If you want to cry you can cry on the inside like a winner or just sweat. It’s hot in that gear room.

After a great dive and a great day at sea, the clients head back to their hotel rooms to shower and edit some photos as they are on a well deserved holiday. Back at the dive centre we still need to clean the cooler boxes, wash the rental gear, check the gear back in or make sure that you find that lost yellow number 17 fin because a new client is checking in the next day and God forbid if you can’t find that fin you need to change the whole gear rental inventory! (That yellow fin is a personal trauma and I did find it eventually). 

Then you still need to make sure that enough tanks are filled for the rest of the day and the next day of diving. That compressor runs all day and all season long! It’s your lullaby at night and your alarm in the morning. The next day you get up and you do it all again!
The back of a dive centre is not a place for sissies.

Some dive professionals work in the front office too, after a trip out it could be your shift on the desk to take phone calls, arrange the catering for the next day, arrange the trips for the next day and attend to some pretty crazy wants and needs from clients. That desk shift/job is not the easiest. We need to appreciate that person on the other line of the phone in the dive industry. Dive professional or not it is hard work!

You do not always smell like coconut, sunblock, shea butter or pineapples. You live in a wetsuit and most mornings you get into a wet wetsuit and some of us pee in them. Listen, you get a diver who pees in their wetsuit and then you get a diver who never admits to peeing in their wetsuit. If you gotta go you gotta goooo!

You need to have patience with people and fixing foggy masks, dealing with bad buoyancy, kitting people up, continuously repeating or explaining things and dealing with people who are anxious in the water by reassuring them that you will keep them safe and that you will make sure that nothing bad will happen to them as long as they listen to you.

Then we get to having patience with nature. Be it the weather or the animals taking their time and doing their own thing since we do work at their mercy you need to keep your poise and stay reassuring. People also get seasick and you need to consider them and show compassion. It is always good to show some humor when things at sea slow down a bit and some people might come across as shy and quiet at first but once they open up you can have amazing and interesting conversations with them at sea. Again, people skills are essential!

When you work far away from home all you want at the end of a really rough day is your mom and her food or that long-distance best friend who actually gets you and who you can rant at and just drink wine on her couch with. Let’s not forget about the dudes and the chicks who have to do those long distance relationships for months at a time, but gosh – those airport reunions make it so worth it!

We do this because when we surfaced from our first open water dive all of that saltwater that came into our nostrils through our leaking, foggy mask went straight into our veins. We saw what the ocean holds and we wanted to keep and protect it from that day on. We got so sucked into the knowledge of what physically happens to our bodies upon the first few meters of descending to that sandy bottom that we just wanted to keep learning about it. We wanted to be as smooth, cool and experienced as our instructors and we also wanted to pass this knowledge on to others.

We are water people, us Scuba divers, Snorkelers, Freedivers and ocean tour guides. Protecting the ocean and teaching people about it is what we are good at and it makes us feel amazing through all the backache, earache and sinus squeeze. We sacrifice and invest a lot into a career that takes a lot of heart, soul and physical energy.

It is for sure not a normal lifestyle and it is not for everybody. We chose it because we have a love for the ocean and its animals which stretches beyond measure, we want to be an influence to others and take the fear of the water away from some people. I love this crazy industry and the people in it who became family to me.

We move around a lot or if we do have a steady home we are rarely there. Outside on the water is where we want to be and if that is on a boat being a whale watching guide, a skipper or a dive guide we are more than happy to go to the sea! We are barefoot, salty and sunburnt wildings and we are more than proud to be this way and to live this life!

Thank you so much to Chris Vyvyan-Robinson, Daniel Schneeberger and My Marty for all the underwater photos, and to Jess Ford and Nina Daniels for always whipping your phones out to take some awesome selfies! (I have added the hyperlinks to their Instagram accounts in their names, go and give them a follow! )