Guo J. W.
2/5
I was part of a dive group(fun divers & OWD students) who patronised Moby Tek from 3-6 Oct. Booking directly with Stacy was smooth, she's helpful with few changes along the way. On arrival day, her crew picked our luggage up from jetty and room was ready.
While things were smooth for a start, we wished it could have been the same for the rest of the trip. Below are few points I wished to share for Moby Tek for improvements.
1. Whiteboard to show daily boat's grouping, dive sites and departure time. Often, we set off 20-30mins after the said time. I understand it might be to cater for latecomers and divers who needs more time to set up their equipment, but the buffer should be passed on to divers individually rather than as a whole. State a "be-ready time" and leave it to divers to judge how much preparation time they need.
2. Better and comprehensive pre-dive briefings by dive guides. Everything can be forsaken but never the safety points, which were covered only by 1 guide for 1 dive, in my total of 8 dives.
3. Better condition of rental gears. A regulator set with hissing octopus that was already returned by another customer came to us when there was also a need to change our initial set. Second set came with a mouthpiece that was not secured by cable tie which led to mouthpiece dislodging from reg mid dive. Partly on us for assuming sets are in 100% condition.
4. IMHO, quality of instructor needs to be better. There was an incident with my OWD student group and the instructor assigned, Affan(PADI #395751) was verbally aggressive when I tried to mediate the situation on boat as a neutral. Basic human respect was not given when he asked for feedback yet simply turned his back on us meddling his own equipment throughout, even after I requested him to face us. Think about it, if someone is right on his points why wouldn't he be courageous enough to look into the eyes of the party he is debating with.
5. After reviewing underwater videos footages filmed by divers in the same group, my conclusion is that Affan should never have held/bind both hands of student divers with his own when they are underwater, it adds on to the dire situation.
Furthermore I was told he had explicitly warned the student divers on land that he will do so underwater if she continues to use her hands to swim underwater. This unnecessarily added duress and stress to students prior to the underwater dive and constitutes to an dangerous act IMO. His underwater hand signal communication also seem excessive, showed impatience and just slightly short of aggressive.
I have my own fair share of encounters with panicked students when I assisted instructors for OWD courses, it is something that I will never do. PADI way of teaching is to teach in a safe and enjoyable environment, he is clearly not of that standard during this course.
We can argue all day long about what his intentions are, but so long the students receive it negatively, his actions should change as an instructor. Period.
6. Again IMHO, Affan should have taken ownership of conducting the course by checking every students' equipment rather than leaving it to students' own buddy-check where things could go wrong, which sadly did go wrong and only to realise it underwater that eventually led to the undesired incident that could be easily prevented.
I do have to commend Nic in handling the situation on board well and made the right decision to return to land immediately, swap the instructor out and take over the remaining portion of the course.
Do note: Moby Tek adopts tec diving setup for students which differs from PADI course curriculum, causing some confusion by students when referring to PADI course materials. This should be explicitly mentioned during booking.
We have expressed our points to both Stacy and Nic in person, but sadly nothing was addressed from the instructor post-incident. I'll leave it to their discretion to counsel the instructor and hopefully some changes on the above points for the better of their dive shop business. Cheers.
