The Inelegant Allure of Being a Divemaster: It's Not About the Glamour

You’ve seen the ads. Clearly, being a Divemaster means you’ll get all the action. You're the coolest of the cool and you know everything there is to know about diving the moment you finish that course and get that sweet, shiny card. Behold, thy badassery.

Yeeeeeahhh, nope. Nope, nope, nope. not quite.

Let’s get one thing straight. If you become a DM for the sole reason of getting laid, you MIGHT be in it for the wrong reasons. Just a hunch.

Let’s start with the purpose of a Divemaster. If not to be eye candy, what the heck are DM’s for?

Divemasters are there to help.

The Divemaster rating is the first step to becoming an instructor. The first rung on the pro ladder. And, hate to tell you this - the bottom of the pro food chain.

Let me explain.

You work your butt off, you take your DM course, you pass, and BOOM! You’re a Divemaster! HOORAY! Your recreational buddies look at you like you’re leaving rainbows and smarties in your wake, a glorious specimen of diving amazingness. Epic, really.

But, assuming you take on DM responsibilities, you’ve now left the world of recreational fun-time diving. Now, you’re responsible for the safety of these students who look up to you. And, you’re responsible for helping the instructors around you. As a freshly minted Divemaster, you’re now considered the least experienced of the Pro ranks. You know nothing, Jon Snow. It’s like being back in Open Water all over again.

Folks, when you become a DM, the first thing you learn (aside from all the dive theory/perfecting your skills/the basics of teaching) is how to help.

How to help the instructors you assist.

How to help the students in your classes.

And, most importantly - how to help yourself improve and learn.

Divemasters volunteer their time to help instructors in their classes. Some instructors pay their DM’s, some don’t. In the tropics, DM’s do frequently get paid to lead tours, but not so much for helping out in classes. DM’s do get paid to teach certain courses, but for the most part - it’s an experience-earning role.

You deal with students who are having difficulty with skills. You go over flooding and clearing a mask a million times, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll get it. You help students put on their gear, and help them remember to turn on their air when they forget that part of their buddy check. You get your instructor whatever they may need, so they can continue the flow of the class.

You haul all the empty tanks at the end of the day, fill them, then arrange them neatly to be messed up again in the morning. When you get the odd student who can’t lift their gear yet, you help lift that gear for them. You babysit students while the instructor is demonstrating or evaluating skills, and you make sure that the occasional jackass isn’t being an unsafe jackass. No one likes an unsafe jackass.

At the end of the day, you’re the one cleaning the pool deck, putting the gear back on the hangers (seriously guys, how hard is it to hang up a BCD!?), and tidying up after your students. And sometimes, you’re the one cleaning the toilets, too.

You also get to introduce people to diving for the first time.

When you teach your first Discover Scuba Diving classes, you get to see the look on someone’s face as they breathe underwater for the first time. You get to tell everyone how cool it is that they used diving regulators to make Darth Vader’s signature breathing sound. You get to set their first impression of diving, and potentially be the reason they get hooked. Funny enough, you get to be the person in the class is more comfortable coming to with their concerns or issues - Instructors are scary, dontchaknow?

You get to help divers who’ve been out of the water for a while refresh their skills. You can spend those sessions focusing specifically on the skills the diver wants to hone, sometimes one-on-one. It’s pretty cool when someone calls to book a skill refresher session, and specifically requests you to teach them because you’ve garnered a reputation for being thorough and patient.

You get to have a student call you after their open water dives, thanking you for spending all that extra time with them during their pool and class, because had you not - they wouldn’t have had the confidence to complete their dives. Even better is when they whip out pictures of their first dive trip, and you can see the smile in their eyes even through their fogged up mask (which was freaking them out in the pool, until you showed them how simple it was to flood their mask and clear it - boom! No fogging!).

Through all this, you get to learn.

You get to take people for tours and show them your favorite local dive sites. You get to be their buddy on their first few dives when they may not be that comfortable. You get to show them what all those skills are good for. And all this means you learn from the students and divers you deal with. You gain experience. You learn how to help different people with different problems.

And really, gaining all that experience makes you pretty kickass. Because you might just be the reason someone falls in love with diving, which for them could change their lives.

Never stop learning. Share your knowledge. Always listen. You might just learn something yourself - or maybe you'll just change someone’s life.