Mark Powell; Recreational Diving Secrets .

Well, good morning, Benjamin Hadfield, Teach Me To Dive. I'm a technical dive instructor in Idaho and Florida. So I teach at High Altitude, I teach at Low Altitude, we teach a lot of really amazing concepts. And we're really blessed today to have Mark Powell. Mark Powell, if you haven't seen his stuff on YouTube, you should definitely go in and check it out. Mark has been with ITI for quite a while and has a lot of great, great information. We talked earlier before I came onto this and I mentioned to Mark, I said, there's a lot of stuff I steal from your classes to teach my own students as well. And he was grateful in that and said, I'm just glad to put the information out. It's not mine, it's general information, but we wanna make sure people are safe. So that's the purpose of today. People like Mark Powell come on here and give us great information to make sure we're diving safer, we have a deeper understanding of what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, and how we can make sure we're coming back safer and creating less accidents. So Mark, thank you so much for taking the time with us today, I appreciate it. Oh, thanks for the invitation. Looking forward to the conversation. Absolutely, that's really what this is. And Mark, I'll tell you really honestly, I started this channel more for me than I did for anybody else. I wanted to talk to cool guys like you and learn. And this was the easiest way to do it with the internet and the power of this. It was, wow, I could record a conversation with somebody as amazing as Mark and I could learn. And if it benefited somebody else, I was like, sweet, it's a twofer. So Mark, let's just jump into it. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you became involved in the diving industry, in particular, safety? So yeah, my involvement in diving goes back a long way until since I was about 10. I did my first try dive when I was about 10. And I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember the feeling of being underwater, the feeling of floating and being able to breathe underwater is one of my clearest memories. And then when I went to university, there was a diving club at the university. So it was the first thing I joined. I was lucky. I went to a university in the south coast of the UK. We were literally 10 minutes from the ocean. So very easy to go diving after classes. And it was a great way of getting into diving. You're with like-minded people. The university supplied a lot of the equipment. So it was a great way of learning. And diving was my hobby for a long, long time. Even teaching, teaching was just a hobby for a long, long time. So I was probably, I was an instructor for about 10 years. And then I thought, well, you know, I enjoy this. Maybe I could make a living out of it. So in 2004, I became a full-time diving instructor. And that was primarily focusing at the time on technical diving. I now teach technical and recreational instructors and instructor trainers. But initially I got into international training because of TDI and stayed because of SDI. And I've always had an interest in trying to make things safer. When I go diving, I wanna come back safely. And when I teach my students, I want them to come back safely. So I realized right from the very beginning that stressing safety as you go through and not just making it some abstract concept, but giving people real world stuff that they can do to make things safer for themselves was, that's how I wanted to teach. So yeah, my philosophy is rather than teaching people to pass a course, I'm teaching them to be safe divers doing whatever they're gonna be doing. So yeah, that's how I got into it. And that's how, I can't say I ever really got into the safety side of things. It was always just my philosophy of how you should teach people to dive safely. Right on. So what is, so I come to you for a technical course, what's your litmus for me to be able to pass your course? So there, I always say the same thing to pretty much every student. There's three aspects to passing a course. There's the knowledge, do you pass the exam? And that's really pretty straightforward. If you don't have the knowledge, then I haven't done my job properly. I haven't given that over to you. So we can go over that until you do understand. There's the individual skills and that can take time. But again, that is pretty straightforward. I think with enough time, most people can achieve the level of skills they need for technical diving. And then the third bit is, are you safe? Do I think that you're gonna be able to go out there and do this sort of diving without killing yourself? And in terms of the litmus test, it's written both in the SDI and the TDI. In fact, all of our agencies, it's written right there in our standards and procedures. You as an instructor cannot sign off a student unless you would be happy for them to dive with one of your loved ones. And so that is genuinely my litmus test. The thought process of, well, would I let you dive with, whether it's a family member or my best friend or whatever? If I wouldn't let you dive with a loved one, with one of my loved ones, why should I let you dive with someone else's loved ones? So it's one of the things I like about SDI, TDI is that that's written right there in the standards. If I say to a student, you're not ready or you don't have the right attitude and they complain to HQ, then if I say, well, it's because I didn't think they were safe, I wouldn't let them dive with my loved ones, then they will back that up completely. Of course, it's gotta be documented and you've gotta give all students, I think you've gotta give them a path towards getting to the point where they can pass. But yeah, that's my litmus test. Would I let them dive with a loved one? Or when I'm teaching instructors, would I let them teach my loved one or would I let them teach someone who's gonna teach my loved one? So yeah, that's our litmus test as an organization, not just me personally. That's amazing and that's exactly how it should be. I know for me, my expression to my students is, you pay for the education, I cannot sell you a certification, unfortunately. So that's what we look at it. And I like your expression of the three pieces of that being very clear. So Mark, let's jump into it. What would you consider the most pressing issue in dive safety today? Oh, wow, that's a big question. I think one of the things I often say, I started off saying this about rebreathers, but I think it applies equally to any form of diving. Diving is perfectly safe as long as you remember how dangerous it is. So one of the problems I think is that whether it's the divers themselves, dive centers, manufacturers, agencies, I think we're all guilty of this to some extent, is this idea that diving is safe. Well, it isn't. You're underwater, you're breathing underwater, you are reliant on life support equipment. Scuba is life support equipment. And people, I think sometimes, underestimate the risks that are involved. There's always something that can go wrong. So a good analogy is driving a car. We all drive, or many people drive, and we get from A to B very, very safely. And that's only because we know that if we make a mistake, if we stop, if we don't pay attention, then you can have some quite dangerous and life-changing injuries. And I think diving is the same. We've got to remember that there are dangers. And I think people underestimate that. As I said, it's not just one part of the industry. A lot of people say, oh, well, diving, the agency should fix this. Well, yes, I think the agencies do have a big part to play in that, but it is the whole picture. Divers themselves sometimes are the problem. Now, oh, I don't need training. I can just pick this up or get it from my buddy. But the problem is you don't know what you don't know, and you don't know what your buddy doesn't know. So experience is fantastic. I'm a big advocate of getting experience, but you also need training as well. Training plus that experience, building that up, and then gradually extending your experience and the depth that you're diving in. So I think the biggest problem facing the diving industry is having honest conversations about what the issues are and how we need to address them. So looking back and at current open water training, what do you think is missing? A big part of what's missing is, I think, well, I'll sum up a huge area in two words, and that's buoyancy and time. So start off with the second one of those. Getting any new skill takes time. And it used to be when I started diving, I started with a club-based system, and it would take months, six months to learn to dive, which is very thorough, produces good quality training, but a lot of people don't want to wait that long. So I think speeding up the training and making it a little bit more efficient is absolutely what we need to do in order to make diving more accessible to the general public. But I think in many areas, we've gone too far in that. Four-day open water courses are now being reduced to three days. There are even places I've seen adverts for people advertising open water courses in two days. Well, I don't believe that you can provide the level of information, practice, time in order to get those skills to be where they need to be for an open water diver in two days. And I think four days is absolute minimum, and maybe five or even six days. And again, this is where it comes back to what I was saying before. It's not the agencies that are entirely at fault. It's not the dive centers. It's not the divers that are entirely at fault. It's a combination of all of those things. You know, if you're a diver and you've got one dive center that's offering a two-day course and one that's offering a six-day course, you're gonna think, well, I'm on my holidays, I'm on my vacation, I'm only here for seven days. And if I take six of them learning to dive, I'm not gonna have time to do anything else. So I'm gonna go for the two-day one. So from a business point of view, there may be many dive centers that want to do longer, but they can't compete with the centers that are doing two-day courses. There is a commercial pressure on dive centers to reduce the amount of time. The way I think we move away from this, because if you take that argument to its logical end, everybody has to run two-day courses, otherwise they can't compete, which I don't believe that that's the case. The analogy I would use, and it applies both to the amount of time that goes in, but also the price for an open water course. If I asked you, what's the price of an open water course in your area, what would the answer be? 400 bucks for a two-week course. Yeah, 400 bucks, that's pretty common worldwide, now, very rarely, and I ask that question a lot, very rarely do people say, well, it depends, okay? What's the price of a car in your area? It depends, it's a very- It depends, what do you mean it depends? Depends on, well, it depends on what type of car you want. You can get a very cheap car, you can get a phenomenally expensive car, you can get a car that goes very fast, you can get a car that'll go off-road, you can get a car that's very economical, and so people are given different choices, and I think that's the secret, that's what we need to do in the diving industry is differentiate ourselves. There will be some people that wanna do a quick and cheap open water course, it's on their bucket list, they wanna tick off a diving course, and then the following week, they're gonna go and do paddle boarding, or paragliding, or mountain climbing, and they'll tick off all of these things, and they wanna try diving, but they're not gonna be divers, and then there are people that think, yeah, I've always wanted to be a diver, this is something I've always wanted to do, I don't just wanna do my open water course, I want to join this cool group of people doing fantastic things, I wanna get involved in research, or public citizen science, or I wanna get involved in archeological research, or conservation, or I just wanna explore the marine life or the wrecks near me, and I wanna be a diver. Well, for them, the quickest, cheapest course is not necessarily what's gonna appeal to them, they want something that's gonna set them up for the future. Equally, you get someone that is earning a reasonable wage, and they've got a couple of cars, they spend a couple of thousand dollars on taking their family on holiday, do they wanna go to the cheapest and the quickest, or do they want something that's actually gonna teach their kids safely, using good procedures, using the latest equipment? So I think that, to me, that's what I would encourage anyone who is starting up a dive school to do, is to think about standard marketing practice, what's my target market? And if you say your target market is, well, anyone, then you're missing out on the basics of business. In almost no other industry do we say, well, everybody is my market. You pick your market, and then you come up with an offering that re-appeals to that market. So, and that can be, it can be the backpackers who want the cheapest course, but don't try and then make it something that would appeal to everyone, make it something that appeals to them. If you wanna appeal to the CEOs and the people who are earning extremely good money, they don't want to be offered the cheapest and the quickest, they want the best quality. And I think then we can start having that discussion about, well, why is that center $400 and that one's $800? Okay, why are you $800 when the guy next door is 400? Well, and then you can start to say, that's because we use all brand new equipment. None of the equipment you learn on will be less than six months old, as opposed to, you might be using equipment that's five or six years old. You'll have an instructor that's got this level of experience. You'll be in small groups that we can focus on you. You'll have more dives so you can build up your time and your experience. So I think those sorts of things will allow us to say, we can provide better level courses. And the second aspect then I said, which fits in is buoyancy. There are still people that say, well, you can't teach buoyancy in an open water course. My retort to that would be, well, if we're not teaching buoyancy, what are we teaching? We want people to go diving. Diving involves swimming around while being neutrally buoyant. If you have an open water student that can't maintain neutral buoyancy, they can't dive. Diving is buoyancy. And more importantly, they're not gonna enjoy diving. It's gonna be hard work. They're gonna be struggling. They're gonna feel uncomfortable. And they're not gonna stick with it. So yep, the two-day backpacker who wants the cheapest, quickest course, and really, they don't wanna be divers. They just wanna have that tick. And to be able to say at parties, yeah, I've done the diving course. Yeah, fine, we can whiz those through. And maybe if they can't maintain their buoyancy, is at the end of the world. But if you've got someone who actually wants to be a diver and you haven't taught them buoyancy, then we're doing a disservice to them and to ourselves. So I'll take a breath there because that's a little bit of a soapbox issue for me. So yeah, I'm happy to talk about that all day, but I'll take a breath. No, that was mind blown. I don't think that's something that I've heard any dive shop take that consideration of what are you trying to accomplish with your diving? And is just a basic course of what you want to do? Or should there be base levels of open water courses? Should we have a course catered towards those who wanna go into natural science or those who want to go into the bigger stuff? Or should we, and should we have the backpacker course that gets them the basic idea of trim and buoyancy and gets them to where they wanna do to go see pretty fish and not crash a reef? So- There are some centers that are doing that. For example, I ran an instructor trainer workshop here in the UK two, three years ago. And I give my instructor candidates the homework of going out and finding how much is an open water course in your area. And one of them came back and gave pretty much the numbers that we've been talking about. The cheapest price was something like 400 and the most expensive was 800, okay? Which is a big spread. But then the thing I found really interesting was that was the same dive center. The same dive center was offering the cheapest and the most expensive. And then that allowed them to have a conversation with the customer as to what did they want? Did they want this included or did they not want that included? One thing that a lot of businesses do is they'll have three prices. There's a cheap, a middle and an expensive. And if you offer three, people will generally go for the middle one. Some people will go for the cheapest, but people will generally, especially if it's something safety related, they'll go for the middle one. And then occasionally somebody will go for the top one. So yeah, that would be my number one suggestion, offer three packages and see where you go from that. Good, better, best. I love it. My mind is blowing and I'm taking it back of trying to, how do I follow up with that? Because I haven't fully processed what the first statement was. So fantastic, oh my goodness. This is not where I would have expected this to go, but I'm glad it did. And that's why we have these conversations, right? Exactly, yeah. So now you spend probably more of your time in the instructor training realm and the technical world. Would that be correct? That's sort of how I started with international training. I'm probably unusual in that my career has sort of taken a, it's almost like a bell shape, obviously started off as a recreational diver. I started probably, I did about 10 years of diving just in the recreational range. In fact, I always remember saying that, why would I need anything more than a 10 liter or an 80 cubic foot cylinder? And around the UK, we have literally thousands of wrecks that are less than 30 meters, 100 foot. So why do I need all of this stuff? And it was really only when I started diving deeper and looking at wrecks that were deeper than that, that I started to get involved in technical diving. I love single cylinder diving. The simpler that it is, the better as far as I'm concerned. So technical diving, technical diving equipment is just a tool to get to the sort of dives that I wanna do. So my career has gone from recreational diving. I got into technical and now every year I'm doing more and more recreational diving. I'm doing a lot of conservation and ghost net projects that are very shallow, just using single cylinders and fantastic, throwing on a single cylinder is much easier. And from a business point of view as well in my role as a director of global development, the biggest part of our business is recreational diving. Well over half of international training businesses comes from SDI. TDI, I always say it's the heart of the organization, but SDI is the head of the organization. So yeah, I do a complete mixture of single cylinder, twin set technical diving, rebreather technical diving. So yeah, it's a nice spread. It's one of the things that I enjoy, the variety of different equipment and techniques that I'm diving, teaching and using on expeditions. What's your favorite course to teach? Oh, so I've got a couple. I still love teaching open water courses. I don't teach that many these days, but I do still love teaching. I used to have a dive center near me and I would sneak in occasionally and teach an open water course. And it used to cause all sorts of hilarity when other divers would see me teaching an open water course but yeah, I still love taking people in for the first time. You never get a second chance to see someone have their first dive. So yeah, open water is still a hugely enjoyable course for me. Then in the technical area, advanced wreck is probably my favorite TDI course to teach. In order to run an advanced wreck course, you've got to be diving on some fairly cool wrecks. Yeah, we're diving on the sort of wrecks that I would be diving for fun anyway. So they're great dives. By the time you get to that level, divers have really got the basics sorted. They're good, solid divers at that point. And so it's not so much teaching, I view it more as coaching at that point. So I'm diving with my peers then. I'm training people to come diving with me the following week and do the sort of diving that I want to do for fun. Then the other one that in the last couple of years I've really enjoyed teaching is the ghost net courses. Ghost net retrieval is something I'm passionate about. And it's something I think we as divers can put back into the community and into the ocean. Well, I'll take out to the ocean is probably a better way of putting it. But yeah, that the voluntary side and doing something positive. And so teaching people to do that is really enjoyable as well. That's awesome. So you teach these open water courses, which I think is fantastic. It is one of my favorite courses to teach as well. I love teaching the tech. I love going back just like you and seeing that first time in the water, that first open water dive. In fact, I have an open water class this evening with seven students that I have three assistant instructors with me to make sure we've got a really great ratio. But how beneficial do you think it is for an instructor that teaches open water to be a technical diver or a technical instructor? It's something I think that not necessarily for open water, but as you get further into technical, sorry, as you get further into recreational diving, you will get students that are asking you, if you're teaching nitrox, then someone will think about the next steps onwards. If you're, especially as you're getting towards the higher levels in recreational diving, when someone's a rescue diver, for example, then they might be thinking, where am I gonna go next? Do I go down the dive master route and start to become a professional? Or do I focus more on my own diving and my own diving skills? The old philosophy used to be, you go through, you become a rescue diver, and then if you wanna be a better diver, you become a dive master and an instructor. And so people that wanted to improve their diving went down that route, even though they had no interest really in teaching or being dive masters, that was sort of the only option that was available. Whereas now I think technical diving offers a way to progress your own diving, progress your own skills in a way that doesn't force people down the professional route when that's not what they're interested in. The only people I think that should become instructors are the ones who are passionate about teaching. If you're not passionate about teaching, don't become an instructor. And I see it on a regular basis. You see people that they become instructors because they think they should. They don't really enjoy teaching, so they're not doing a great job of it. They're not energizing their students, they're not creating people who are excited about diving, and they're losing the fun in doing that diving themselves. So yeah, if you're not enjoying it, do something else. Go explore wrecks, go and do some conservation, take up photography, find something that does interest you. So I think towards the higher levels, recreational divers, it's useful if they've, recreational instructors rather, it's useful if they've got experience of technical diving. But for an open water instructor, I don't think it's essential. Now, that's not to say that we don't want open water instructors who've got good buoyancy skills and team awareness and situational awareness, many of the skills that come from technical diving. A lot of people get into technical diving in order to fine tune those skills. I don't think that's the only place or necessarily the best place where we should be teaching those skills. So open water instructors should have perfect buoyancy. They should have fantastic situational awareness. Otherwise, they're not gonna be able to do that job as an open water instructor. Some of the most aware people underwater I've ever seen are open water instructors. When you've got new divers who've never been in the water, then your head has to be on a swivel. You've gotta know what is going on at every possible moment. You've gotta be anticipating what's gonna happen next and what could go wrong. So if we're saying you should do some technical training in order to gain those skills, then we're not providing the right level of training. Within SDI, we demand that all of our open water instructors can demonstrate all skills neutrally buoyant. It's up to them exactly how they teach it. And there are some skills that you may want to do in contact with the bottom, but every open water instructor, every recreational instructor should be capable of doing all of the skills neutrally buoyant. And that's the prerequisite for our open water instructor course. First thing that they will do on the open water course in the pool sessions is demonstrate that they can do all of these skills. So yeah, I'm not saying that we don't need the same level of skills as a technical diver. Actually, quite the opposite. I'm saying that we should have those level of skills, but we should be teaching those in recreational courses and not have to go to technical courses or technical ages in order to get some of those skills. That makes sense. So tell us about the path for instructors. So you've got a young dive master, or a dive master, let's say. Tell us about that path that you see that's the most efficient to take them from that point into professional instruction. So yeah, I think you're right to pick up on the dive master. Rescue diver and dive master, I think are two of the most important courses in the industry. If you do a good rescue diver and dive master course, instructor, actually pretty straightforward. So to me, rescue diver, there's two aspects to rescue diver. The one is doing the rescues, but the most important bit is avoiding the rescues. So the rescue diver is the one that's diffusing the situation and stopping that developing to the point where someone needs to be rescued. That, of course, obviously is an absolutely critical skill for an instructor. So if you've got someone, if you've got a rescue diver who can avoid accidents, but who can also then deal with accidents if they do occur, that's a fantastic foundation for moving on. So a good rescue diver course makes your dive master course pretty straightforward. Because then when you're talking about dive master, that's where we really hone the skills. So I said that the instructor needs to be able to demonstrate all the skills neutrally buoyant. Where do they learn to do that? In the dive master course. So my dive masters will have all the skills they need in order to then go on to the instructor course. The dive masters can help and assist instructors can take qualified divers diving. So all of that dive site organization, safety, thinking about safe places to get in and out, thinking about what happens if something goes wrong. Again, all of that should be covered in the dive master. So by the time they get to their open water instructor course, they know how to manage diving operations and know how to get students safely in and out of the water. So then the instructor course is, okay, how do we teach? So that combination of rescue diver leading on to dive master, leading on to instructor, I think of those and you've got the option of putting assistant instructor in there as well. But even if you don't, those three things taken together is how you produce really good instructors. If there's a break in that chain, and I've seen people who their rescue course basically is you tow someone, you lift someone, you deal with one scenario and that's it, you're a rescue diver. That isn't a rescue diver. And then they're gonna struggle because they're not thinking about what could go wrong when they're going to the dive master course. And then equally, I've seen dive master courses where it's a tick box exercise and they're not really thinking about real world problems, not working with real students. So then when they go on to their open water instructor course, they're not really ready. They're not aware of some of the problems that might occur. So yeah, that would be my advice. If you're a young diver and you want to move into the industry and become a professional instructor, find someone who's gonna give you really good, thorough rescue diver course that's gonna help you avoid getting into problems. Then find a dive master course that is gonna give you real practical experience of working with students in a variety of different conditions, thinking about the real world problems that you might come across. And then when you get onto your instructor course, it's gonna be pretty straightforward because then all you have to do is learn how to teach not all of those other things all in one go. Yeah, because you can't teach all of those three things on an instructor course. You don't have enough time. You have to assume that some of those were taught in the rescue and the dive master course. That's a great path. And I like that. And that's exactly how we've taken up teaching here is creating a fantastic rescue diver dive and then dive master. And we teach them at the instructor level of what we expect and then prepare them ready so that they are good to go. And so assistant instructor or instructor is just a simple progression of how to physically teach the classes. I like that. I like it. Exactly, yeah. This has been mind blowing for me, Mark. I appreciate everything we've talked about. And if you don't mind, I definitely wanna break this into two parts of what it's gonna end up being. To be honest with you is part one is gonna be all recreational. Part two is gonna be technical. So if you don't mind, we'll break it here and we'll have a part two. Would that work? Yep, that sounds like a good idea. Perfect. Again, guys, my name is Benjamin Hadfield. I'm a technical dive instructor here in Idaho. I teach open water as well. It's one of my favorite courses to teach, but it's all. Teaching and bringing students up has just been a joy. And it's an absolute pleasure to have somebody of Mark Powell's caliber on our show today that really talked through. So part one, we talked about a lot of recreational key points. Where did he come from? And what does it look like for a dive shop to be a better dive shop? What does it look like to be a better student, better open water and a path to instructor? Now, please make sure if you like this kind of content, subscribe to our channel, hit the like button, all that fun stuff and share it with everybody that will possibly listen to you. Because as you all know, we all get that dollar penalty every time we talk about diving to our friends when we haven't been asked enough to pay for a trip to Belize. So it works out pretty well. So part two, make sure to come back. We're going to talk a lot of technical diving. We're getting into a little bit of stuff about bubble models. We're going to talk about technical diving, preparing for that. I've got a couple of fun questions that I know Mark's got the answer to that I think you will want to know the answer to as well. So make sure to stay tuned for part two. Mark, thanks for coming on. It's been a pleasure. Absolutely.