Scuba Instructor: Project Bay Islands
Added to website: 07 November 2005
I have just come home after spending 4 months working as the Scuba Instructor for Coral Cay at the site in Helene, Honduras. I had a great time and one of the highlights was training some of the local guys to dive.
A lot of the local men from Helene are involved in the lobster and Conch fishing business as divers. They start work as young as fifteen years old and are not given any form of scuba training. They can do up to twenty dives in a days work, to depths of up to forty metres. The equipment they use is very basic, a tank strapped to the divers back with only a single regulator to breathe from. They have no gauge to measure their air, in fact, when I asked one of my students how they know when the air is low, he replied ‘ you can feel it gets hard to breathe so then you swim to the surface before it runs out’. This is why the lobster fishermen have such a problem with decompression sickness, or ‘the bends’. They are doing one dive straight after the other to dangerous depths with no surface interval to allow their body to release nitrogen. This, combined with the fast ascent to the surface often results in decompression sickness.
The main aim in teaching the Open Water Course to these guys was the aspect of safety. In the water they are very confident. By teaching the theory part of the course, they learnt how to avoid decompression sickness and other diving injuries. They also learnt how to use the equipment properly. I then did the Advanced Course with them, which leads them up to Dive Master, offering them an alternative occupation in the tourism industry.
Most people on Helene know someone who has died or become paralysed from the bends. But, this is not just a problem on Helene alone, it is widespread across Central America. The training I have done is only on a small scale but it has had a very positive result, which made it even more enjoyable.
-Katie Dann.
