As a fol­low up to my roadmap to becom­ing a dive instructor I now want to share a few stor­ies that, in some form, could hap­pen to you if you do decide to go that way. I have changed all names to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the stu­dents and/or dive schools involved. All stor­ies are true!

Erica, The Amazon

Erica was a Ger­man woman of around 50 years and she had booked a three-day open water course with me on Gili Trawan­gan. On the first day she already arrived about 1,5 hours late. The first thing she said to me, even before intro­du­cing her­self, were if I knew this Ger­man pro­fessor, appar­ently an expert in diving the­ory, and one she was lucky enough to have had as a tutor at uni­ver­sity some 30 years back. Our rela­tion­ship was doomed when I said I had never heard of the guy.

Any­time I tried to teach her some­thing she answered that Pro­fessor Know-It-All thought dif­fer­ent. Of course, she never even once did her home­work and couldn’t grasp simple con­cepts like air expand­ing when you ascend to shal­lower depths. It took the last bit of my will­power not to lose my patience. While I laboured away, all the other instruct­ors and dive­mas­ters thought Erica and I were the best enter­tain­ment since col­our TV.

Before our first pool ses­sion I took her to our equip­ment room to get her the right sized gear. I had a look at her, told her to get changed and then turned round to our gear. After pick­ing up some equip­ment I turned back to her and there she was, stand­ing around half naked, wear­ing only her knick­ers. I will never for­get that sight. In fact I still have night­mares and wake up scream­ing, drenched in sweat.

Just at that moment, Epul, one of our local dive­mas­ters, came in and stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth opened and his gaze dropped down to Ericas knees, just where her boobs ended. His head went bright red with shame and embar­ras­ment and he fled as fast as he could. Of course, Erica thought it was per­fectly accept­able to go top­less in a muslim coun­try, but even­tu­ally she agreed to use the toi­let to change and even man­aged to put a bikini top on.

To my great dis­s­a­point­ment Erica was actu­ally very good in the water and mastered the skills quickly. But I got my revenge. Erica had put the final exam off for as long as she could, claim­ing she needed more time to study. After the last dive I sat her down with the mul­tiple choice test, told her again that it was very easy and that it was in fact designed for 10-year old Amer­ic­ans. Erica failed miser­ably and only man­aged to answer 50% of the ques­tions cor­rectly. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face when I told her the res­ult and that I could not cer­tify her given the cir­cum­stances. Not very pro­fes­sional, but I had abso­lutely no patience left in me.

When Erica star­ted scream­ing at me what an incom­pet­ent instructor I had been, in fact I was so incom­pet­ent that I didn’t even know Pro­fessor Know-It-All, I handed her off to our man­ager, who told her in no uncer­tain terms that she would have to stay a day longer, study the night and retake the exam the next morn­ing. Lucky for me, I had a day off the next day and went out on the boat for a couple of relax­ing fun dives and never saw Erica again. The worst thing of these three days with Erica was, though, that I had had to hand off another course full of blond scand­inavian girls for her, just because I was the only german-speaking instructor at the dive school…

If you liked this post about Erica, then tune in again at the next post of the series ‘Anec­dotes of a Dive Instructor’. This one will be about the first three courses I taught as a newly cer­ti­fied instructor!