Teaching people to dive involves some theory work, some pool work and 'real' diving in the sea. This week, I took some people had never tried diving before in the morning and in the afternoon did some pool instructing with another young man. At the end of our session which went well enough he told me he didn't want to go out diving the next day as he was rather nervous about going down deep. I told him to sleep on it, come the next day and see how he felt.
So he does turn up, we go on the boat to the dive site and I get him into his gear. I told him that rather than just going down, we would just put our regulators in and swim around on the surface for 10 minutes; more like snorkelling than diving.
So that's what we do, and low and behold, as we are swimming around one of the first things I spot is a barracuda just a few metres from us. I had seen a fairly large school of them a few weeks ago at the same dive site but this one was a little larger than those and was on its own. Like sharks, barracuda have an untrue reputation for being vicious. True they are stealth hunters but they would never regard humans as prey. It would appear that they some times mistake diver's/snorkeller's silver jewellery for small fish or in the case of divers, we have lots of stainless steel clips and rings on our gear that might momentarily glint in the water. Anyway, this one was fairly placid and just slowly swam away.
Because of our enforced surface swim, we were the only one to spot a barracuda that day. Just the luck of being in the right place at the right time.
And my student? Well I got him down below eventually and swimming and by dive number two he was a lot more confident and we were able to sign him off as a certified scuba diver.