Guiding divers
Keeping the dive under control as a divemaster
Guiding is learned through practice. Your Dive Guide Manual provides you with plenty of information, and you’ve certainly already participated in several dives as a guided diver. If you’re used to diving independently and your orientation is solid, your focus will now shift to the dive group.
What do divers expect from a guide?
As a guide, you’re responsible for ensuring your entire group has a great dive. Perhaps it’s the particularly well-camouflaged creatures you can reliably find and show, perhaps it’s the calm you project to beginners – you should do something exceptionally well if you want to be remembered positively. Think about it, or discuss in your group: What do you remember particularly well? Which guide helped you the most? With whom did you experience the best dives? And what bad experiences have you had?
Organizing groups
Even before getting in the water, there’s plenty to do. You need to get to know your dive group and decide what type of dive is appropriate for them. This may also involve dividing divers into multiple groups together with other divemasters.
What should you pay attention to? What can work, and what will likely lead to problems?
In our quiz, you can work through various scenarios and ideally discuss them with other candidates. These are exactly the kinds of questions you’ll encounter again and again in everyday practice – often without a single best solution. That’s why it’s all the more important that you think it through and figure out which questions are most important to you when organizing groups.
Briefing
Your SSI Manual explains in great detail everything that belongs in a briefing.
You’ll probably notice that briefings in practice are often shorter. This is because you don’t need to explain everything from scratch each time to divers who have been around for several days. Listen to briefings from as many guides as possible and consider what’s important for each specific group.
So you know the criteria by which your briefing will be evaluated, you can review the evaluation form. The form doesn’t provide a sensible structure – you’ll have to develop that yourself!
Guiding
Guiding groups is the core of practical training. You can certainly discuss it at length – but it’s best done live, on-site, with a view of the real conditions.
What remains the same for everyone are the evaluation criteria. Feel free to review them carefully in advance so you’re clear on what’s important.
