Recreational diving is a fun and relaxing sport meant to be enjoyed. But what happens when things don’t go as planned: Your mask comes off, your regulator gets knocked out, or someone in your group runs out of air?
Any of those scenarios could happen during your dive career. Planning for, thinking about, and practicing these situations and your reactions can be the difference between life and death.
My last tour in the U.S. Coast Guard was at the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC) in Panama City, Florida. I served as the Coast Guard liaison dive officer with a detachment of Coast Guard dive instructors. Our duties included selecting and training Coast Guard divers, running the annual cold weather ice-diving course, and integrating into military diver training.
All the NDSTC courses are intentionally demanding and rigorous. Students come from all walks of life, and most have never breathed compressed gas before. They spend a lot of time in the pool during the first weeks, training and completing exercises to get comfortable in the water. They do multiple sessions of daily swims, treads, weighted exercises, and cardiovascular exercises on the pool deck. The training focuses on aquatic adaptability and takes those who are good in the water to being nearly elite.
The training is tested during pool week, which is when students first experience wearing and using scuba equipment. Students practice with basic equipment on land and in the water, working in teams to ensure all items are donned correctly.
Pool week is a culmination of muscle memory and the ability to stay calm and think through the processes during demanding problems the trainers impose. Students work toward passing pool week and moving on, but some don’t make the cut, and others repeat the instruction.
The staff helps the divers work through dive briefs, predive checklists, and hands-on checks before they get in the water. Once in the pool, students conduct thorough buddy checks to ensure they have no deficiencies, and the staff keeps a watchful eye on proper procedures.
Students swim circles while staring at the bottom of the pool, and the instructors are split between safety divers and problem imposers. While safety divers are at the bottom of the pool in scuba to assist students and grade them, the imposers are on the surface and do breath-hold diving. The imposer picks an unsuspecting student and imposes a situation on them while they are on the pool’s bottom.
The problems start off light — a mask removed, a regulator pulled from their mouth, or a strap pulled off — and the student must maintain their equipment and solve the problem. They progress to more difficult problems, such as tank straps totally removed, air turned off, fins removed, or a knotted regulator hose. The students must stay at the bottom of the pool, assess the problem, fix it, and present themselves to the safety diver for inspection and evaluation. They will either pass or need to repeat the process.
Students must try to maintain control of their equipment, especially their tanks, which the imposer tries to take away, sometimes successfully. It’s a tough week, and students endure many phases of problems as both single divers and buddy pairs.
To get a sense of this training, imagine you’re at the bottom of the pool, geared up, face glued to the bottom with anticipation of what’s coming. You hear the person in front of you being tested by an imposer, but you don’t look while swimming by. You ball up and hold your tank straps every time something touches you.
Then it’s your turn, and your straps go flying, your mask is ripped off, your regulator is yanked from your mouth, and you hold on to what you can during the violent ride. Imposers normally get you after an inhale, but it’s sometimes on an exhale.
The 10-second beating feels like a lifetime. As you recover, you first think that you just want to breathe. You need to find your regulator and get it back in your mouth, check that your air is on, and see if your regulator is fouled. Seconds tick by as you recover your regulator and take those first breaths of air.
You give the OK signal to your instructor and prepare for an inspection with your mask back on and cleared, tanks back on with their straps without twists, and fins recovered along with other items the imposer might have removed. Point deductions are stringent, even for something as seemingly innocuous as a twisted strap.
The grades are all about attention to detail. A few small mistakes could snowball into a dive fatality, which is why the test is so particular. The more details you miss, the more you demonstrate your lack of self-control in an adverse situation.
As you prepare for the assessment, you make your final checks and get on your knees so the safety diver can inspect and grade you. You wonder if you passed the hit or missed something. At the end of the day you are exhausted mentally and physically, but the muscle memory has begun to take hold. By the end of the week, the tests are just another process that you recover from and move on.
Why should you do aquatic adaptability training? These situations might not occur often in open-water diving, but if they do, your muscle memory will kick in to help you stay calm and think through the problem without panicking. Even the best diver has a bad day, and being able to rely on practiced situations and skills is the difference between life and death.
I am not saying to start pulling gear off fellow divers — that’s not the intent. The training situations I have described are in a highly controlled environment, and the extensive safety procedures and helpful staff keep the training safe for everyone.
Incidents can occur, so have a predive brief with your buddy, discuss scenarios, and plan how you would work through it.
Diving is an amazing experience, and there is nothing else I would rather do. But I challenge you to think about possible situations and a course of action that will prevent panic and lead to safe diving.
Jelajahi Lebih Lanjut
See some of the NDSTC’s pool week training in this video.
© Penyelam Siaga – Q2 2025
