The honor of breaking me into the rewarding (but not high paying) career of assistant instructor fell to Ed Stetson, a diver and waterman without equal. Ed taught an assistant instructor certification course to several proto-instructors just a few weeks before. When he put out a call for volunteers to help assist a class at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I immediately volunteered.

Dive classes are divided into three parts--classroom instruction, pool skills training, and open water dives. The class took advantage of all the facilities a university has to offer, a good classroom, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and in the case of UCSB, the Santa Barbara Channel for open water dives. Ten students enrolled for the four-week-long class. During the swim test, we discovered that while ability varied, they were all competent swimmers. Some would swim like dolphins, the others just kind of paddled along. None swam like an anchor, for which we silently thanked Poseidon. The group of ten soon coalesced into a class. In class, Ed or I would occasionally make reference to a hypothetical diver who thought he knew everything as "a real Mike Nelson." We rotated buddies throughout the pool skills sessions. Confident of their abilities, we scheduled the open water dives at Anacapa Island for July 26 and the beach dive for July 27--one year to the day that I was certified as a basic diver.

You may know the typical July Southern California weather pattern--low clouds and fog, with partial clearing along the coast in mid-afternoon. (In fact, people speculate that one reason our TV weather personalities are such clowns is that they have to be entertaining since the weather seldom varies.) We boarded the M/V Captain Midnight owned by Jerry Shapiro, attorney-turned-dive-boat-owner, and skippered by Capt. Don MacIntyre, from whom I learned a great deal about reading the moods of the sea. The crossing from Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard to Anacapa Island went very smoothly, the seas behaved with little swell.

First Dive--Bat Ray Cove

The appropriately named "Bat Ray Cove," scene of our first dive, did not live up to its billing on this day, at least for my team. Ed asked me to take four students on a tour. Jurgen was an exchange student from Germany. Bruce graduated a few weeks earlier and spent the summer tying up some loose ends his academic record before moving on. Dave, in his third year of Pre-law wanted to learn to dive so he stayed around for the summer session. Bill, a temporary refugee from urban Los Angeles, came to UCSB for summer school to escape USC. (That's University of Southern California, not University for Spoiled Children.)

After carefully checking each student's gear at the gate, we entered the water one at a time, faced the divemaster and gave the "OK" sign. We dropped down the anchor line and began our underwater tour. The marine life cooperated, we examined sea hares, identified scallops and the plentiful abalone, and tried to play tag with an octopus that really didn't want to be "it." The twenty-five-foot visibility made the dive seem effortless, the group stayed together. We surfaced near the stern of the boat, climbed aboard the swim stair, shed our fins, and boarded the boat. I learned working with later classes things do not always go so well.

Second Dive--Barracuda Rock

After recovering all the divers, and taking roll call to make sure, we moved the boat to Barracuda Rock. This time the location lived up to its billing. My team consisted of the same four divers with the addition of Mattius, another German student. I check each diver's repetitive group computation. We visited a nearby underwater arch, but had to cut the excursion short when the first diver with 750 psi of pressure signaled "low-on-air." We stay longer, 30 minutes, and go a bit deeper, 30 feet, on this dive. On the way to the surface, we spotted the silver torpedo-like silhouette of a barracuda. On the surface, we practiced the kelp crawl--a necessary skill to learn.

Now, if you dive in California, you will eventually find that a rather large kelp bed positioned itself between you and the boat or the beach during your dive. Also, for some unexplained reason, you will not have enough air left in the tank to drop down and swim through the kelp. If you can't go under the canopy, and can't go around it, you have to go through it. The boat will not come and pick you up. California divers relish telling horror stories about how "man-eating" kelp drowns unsuspecting divers when they become entangled in the algae, akin to the Sargasso Sea trapping ships. My own optometrist related how he quit diving after finding the body of a diver wound into the kelp at Catalina. Don't believe it! To listen to these stories, one would conclude that the kelp beds are littered with bodies and that more divers are attacked by the kelp than are certified in any single year! Crawling through kelp can be a pain-in-the-ass, but if done correctly is a mere nuisance. The secret is not to panic, keep air in the BC, pass over it, and next time plan your dive a little bit better!

When we got back to the boat, I mentioned to Dennis Divins, the UCSB Diving Officer, that we saw barracuda. He grabs a spear gun and hops into the water. Next thing I know, he comes back with a fine specimen for the evening's dinner.

Third Dive--Barracuda Rock

We don't move the boat for the third and final dive of the day. On this dive, I show two divers, around the area. Both divers adapt well to the ocean, but the look in the eyes of one of the divers makes me a little more cautious on this dive. Despite the OK sign, I see in one of the divers the onset of wide-eye apprehension. I do what my training tells me to do, I stop the tour, evaluate the situation, and decide on a course of action, which means getting the diver to the surface. The situation did not turn into limb-thrashing panic nor was it likely that it would have. I still have a conservative approach whenever I work with new divers.

We again took roll-call. In the 10 years that I worked as a divemaster, I always had an irrational fear of leaving someone behind. Can you imagine coming to the surface only to see the boat sailing away? Can you imagine getting a call from the Coast Guard as your boat pulls into the slip inquiring about the one you left behind? (In court, the attorney for the estate might be sarcastic and ask if you threw it back because you thought it was too small.) I always insisted on positive verification that all the divers were indeed back on board before we pulled the hook and headed for the barn. That habit started on this trip and has served me (and my divers) well. Not only have my boats always returned to shore with the same number of divers, they were same ones who got on board the boat that morning.

The graduation dive took place at Hendry's Beach near Santa Barbara. The weather reruns from the previous day as it will tomorrow. The beach offers all the attributes for a great dive, lots of parking, an area for gearing up, easy access to the water, a decent rock reef with kelp close to shore, freshwater showers, and a good restaurant for the apres-dive debriefing. It also offers a beach break large enough to show students how to do surf entries and exits but not so large as to knock them down in the process.

Fins on and shuffling backwards, we enter the water in a line. Ed takes one end of the line and I take the other. We act as choreographers for what looks like a line of drunken sea lions doing the cancan. Only Dave, who carries the dive flag, float, and anchor, is excused from the dance. I think if I started doing the conga, all would follow my lead. The line breaks as students stop and brace for the two-foot wave that comes in. At chest-deep water, we roll over and kick out. At this point, I play border collie, working to keep buddy pairs together and the pairs together as a group, reminding divers that the slower swimmer sets the pace for the team.

We drop down into 25 feet of water on the edge of the reef. I stay on the bottom while Ed brings the divers down one-buddy-pair-at a time. Visibility, a spotty 20 feet, gets driven lower if the students begin to thrash around. These kids are pretty good. Ed goes down the line doing final skill checks with each student--mask removal and replacement, regulator removal and recovery and so on. I'm an outrider, swimming back and forth in the event that anyone needs assistance. After the checks, we break into two groups. I show the divers how to use sand ripples for navigation. We see many crabs and kelp bass. We even get checked out by a bat ray, who undoubtedly came by to apologize for being absent from Bat Ray Cove the day before.

The dive ends uneventfully. We hold our dive debriefing. We pose for the obligatory after-dive photos. Today's dive will be number 47 in my log book. I was certified as a basic diver one year ago to the day.

Dave hosts a graduation BBQ at his apartment that night. At the event, he pulls me aside and asks, "who's this guy Mike Nelson that you guys keep talking about? Was he a student of Ed's who had really screwed up?" Just then I knew that there was a generation gap, even though I was only nine years older than the person asking the question.

Teaching scuba is a lot like love affairs. They come and go, they last a short period of time (but what a wonderful time), and while you may forget faces and names of the participants after a few dozen, you will always remember most the details about your first, even though it was the most awkward. So it is with mine. So it is with mine.

The saying, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a small step," appropriately describes my life path that began in that instant. Over the last decade-and-a-half, I assisted dozens of scuba diver certification courses. At times this underwater activity has been a hobby, a vocation, a job, and an obsession. I have met a lot of interesting people along the way and its been a lot of fun. I've also met a fair number of people for whom diving may be the quickest path to final judgement, but that's another story.

One of the divers in this story, Dave Porter, went on to become a very good friend and an excellent dive buddy. We took the UCSB dive club trip over to Catalina for a weekend that is still talked about. He became an assistant instructor and went on to teach one season at the Club Med in Playa Blanca, Mexico. I visited him for a week at the Club. When I walked in, Dave and the Chief of Scuba asked if I would be interested in staying for two weeks and teaching scuba, since they were unexpectedly short-staffed at the end of the season. Despite the tempting offer, I could not accept since I had an obligation to get back to in the states. I did work as a dive guide for that week on the morning dives, which allowed the regular dive staff a little relief time. When I flew out at the end of the week, Ed flew in to finish out the one week left in the season.