What Guiding Means

After working in close proximity and sharing office space with another dive company, I have been watching how others operate above and below the water. As a dive instructor, I have been struck by the huge variance in guides. And after shadowing my husband Tim today at his dive site, watching him lead dives and teach, I am inspired to write about it.

Google defines a guide as: “a person who advises or shows the way to others.” For many companies in our little section of land in the Pacific, a dive guide is someone who leads an underwater tour. As I have observed in the company working nearest to me, they go in at the same place, the same time, following the same routine: take a group in, swim with their back to the participants looking for some cool wildlife to show them, often handling said wildlife. Sometimes they do a dive briefing, sometimes they don’t. For some guides, the class is an opportunity for them to show you how much they know. So basically, a guide here on our island, with few rare exceptions, is a person who takes you in the ocean and points out cool stuff. There is nothing wrong with that kind of guide. Hundreds of people have had fun in the ocean with guides like that this year alone.

It’s just that what we do is entirely different.

Who we are at heart as well as our intensive training reflects in our guiding style. For Tim and I, a guide is someone who is with you from square one, addressing your concerns, tailoring the dive to your needs and abilities. A guide is someone who holds your hand if you are unsure, helps calm you down and gets you to breathe through the learning curve. A guide is someone who is watching so they can reach out and gently lift you before you skin your knee on corral. A guide is someone who teaches you not only the basics, but also in depth information about the physics behind what you are learning. They have studied what is harmful to the creatures of the sea and they don’t do that, they show you wildlife without harassing them, they inspire you to also protect what you love. But underwater, for us as guides, you are the number one priority. You may see great things while we are keeping you safe, but our attention is on you.

For us, a guide is someone who inspires, who believes you can do this, someone who encourages you and is proud of you for trying new things.  A guide is someone who monitors your air closely and increases your dive time by working with you to swim efficiently.  A dive with us is not just tagging along with a knowledgeable person, it is experiencing the ocean with someone who is there diving not for themselves, but diving for you. This is why it’s entirely different. How and where the group enters the water, how we weight you, the pace, the depth, all this is different every dive because we realize we are taking out individuals. 

For us, being a guide is a responsibility to our guests, but also to the ocean. We pick up trash when we see it, we stop people from touching turtles because we see the tumors that causes, we talk to people spraying on sunscreen that poisons the reef.

Sure, it’s a cool job and we get to work outside in a beautiful place, but for us, it’s more than that - we are caretakers of you and of the ocean.  I guess being a guide means a bit more to us than the average Scuba Steve - it’s about educating, encouraging, inspiring, watching over, assisting, believing in and yes, advising and enthusiastically showing the way to others.