You Won't Impress Your Cave Instructor

I am so sorry for disappointing you!” My student apologized as he tossed his cave diving light into the gear crate and dropped his fins beside my truck.

- NATALIE GIBB

He had made a navigational mistake during his Full Cave Course, but this reaction was way over the top. If he had a sword, he would have fallen on it out of embarrassment. “I don’t deserve to do another dive today,” he declared. It took me a while to talk him back into the water.

Interestingly, this is a common issue in technical and cave diver training. There’s some strange need within the student to impress the instructor with their diving skills. And far from judging, I have been guilty of this behaviour myself.

Once upon a time, I enrolled in an Advanced Cave Sidemount Course given by one of my cave diving mentors. There is a specific skill that I was concerned about—breathing directly from the tank valve while ‘feathering’ the valve open and closed. It’s a self-rescue technique to access gas from a cylinder in case of a regulator failure. The idea is that in tight caves, you may not be able to reach your buddy to get a tank from them. This is difficult to do, as I am neither a particularly coordinated nor naturally excellent diver. I just work really hard.

I was convinced I would impress the instructor by doing the best tank valve breathing the world had ever seen, so I practiced the skill myself for hours. I got pretty good at it, but I failed miserably on the day of the course. Something about the instructor watching me gave me such severe performance anxiety that I could not demonstrate a skill I had practiced for hours.