After I stopped working, I promised myself I would take on challenges simply because I could. No deadlines. No clients. No targets. Just the freedom to choose how I spend my time.
The SSI Divemaster course on Gili Trawangan became my first major “I can do whatever I want” project.
On paper it was about becoming a better diver. In reality it was also about bringing structure back into my days and, ideally, drinking a bit less. The last few months in Singapore had really been a bit of an alcoholic mess without any structure and just waking up at midday and drinking until friends finished work and could drink with me until evening. It sucked, and I was spiriling down. Booking the diving course and terminating my lease in Singapore gave me a hard stop to get out of that rut and try and put my life back on something of a normal human track.
The course really did give me all of that and more.
Choosing the Course
I went back to Manta Dive, where I had done all my earlier certifications. It felt familiar, and I trusted the team. My group trickled in over a few days with people starting slightly before or after me. The people I connected with most were a Norwegian couple who were clearly doing well financially and were of a similar age. We got along instantly and ended up spending a few days day drinking together. On one of the later days, we were joined by a girl from Chile who became a close friend almost immediately.
My main instructor was Kini. The official start time each day was 7:45 a.m, which honestly was a system shock for me. Some days I skipped, either because I had been out the night before, or because I was dealing with a sinus squeeze, a stye in my eye, or a mid-course trip to Bangkok for a conference. Diving every day is more physically and mentally draining than it sounds. I quickly learned I do not love scuba diving enough to do it every day from morning until night.
Training and Skills
The course is part apprenticeship, part endurance test. There are the obvious diving skills, like assisting teaching perfect buoyancy, mask removals, and navigation. Then there are the harder physical challenges, such as the 25 metre underwater swim. That one took me three attempts and left me gasping. learning backfinning absolutely sucked. I never mastered it.
Much of the in pool assisting essentially ended up with me spending hours in the pool, simply observing total strangers complete the absolute basic of scuba skills whilst I just hung about a meter below the surface waiting for the class to be over.
By the final weeks, things started to click. I passed my dive briefing and guiding evaluations on the first attempt, though I made sure the instructors knew I was on a tight schedule.
I’d like to say I saw some incredibly exotic and interesting marine life, but this isnt a Disney movie. It was a lot of turtles and schools of assorted fish I still couldn’t identify with a gun to my head.
I had previously seen a blue ringed octopus whislt diving at Gili, but no such luck on this course.
Moments That Stand Out
The underwater proposal will always be my highlight. We staged it as a photo shoot so the bride-to-be had no idea. It was the worst kept secret in the dive centre, but we managed to keep her in the dark. At 30 metres, he pulled out the sign upside down before flipping it to read “Will you marry me?” She nodded, bubbles everywhere. Despite being probably more hungover than I should have been to dive, we did a negative entry from the boat and I dropped like a stone right to 30m. Despite being low on air I joined in blowing air from my reserve regulator in the background of the proposal photos. I surfaced nitrogen narced as fuck and low on air – I did an air-sharing ascent with one of the guides – and then went straight home and slept off the rest of my hangover.
One dive after a few beers the night before I kind of got narced or something at a relatively shallow depth of 20-25 meters. I spaced out massively and remember looking at my heads like it was a dream, My mind raced nonsense words and gobbledigook phrases in English and German. Not sure what that was but I had no business diving and had to abort, come up, and go home and rest. Unfortunately for one of my fellow divemaster trainees, that was on his first dive as guiding, sorry, Andrius.
One morning I lay in bed staring at my portfolio before heading to the dive centre and watched increased by a quarter of a million dollars in the space of around an hour. I walked in to the dive centre doing my best to act completely normal and keep the news to myself. But later that night I couldn’t hold my composure and ended up buying two bottles of champagne for the whole team. Over the eight weeks I bought six bottles in total, always at night after the diving was done, for birthdays, course completions, and just because I felt like it.
I also bought two instructors brand new SMBs. One had lost his on a dive with me and he said his wife would kill him for it. The other had been joking for weeks that he would take mine after I left.
What I Learned
The Divemaster course made me a better diver, but not in the way I expected. The real mastery was not in the technical skills. It was in managing people, keeping them safe, and solving problems before they became emergencies. For me, that was the least enjoyable part.
As my particular blend of autism often manifests in a complete lack of understanding the emotions or feelings of others, the constant interpersonal management was exhausting. Guiding a dive means you are not enjoying your own dive. You are scanning, counting, and adjusting the whole time. The sense of freedom I get when diving recreationally disappears when I am responsible for others.
Would I Do It Again?
Yes, but not to work as a professional. The Divemaster course is worth doing for the challenge, the skills, and the memories. It is not worth doing if you expect it to be a source of long-term joy or income unless you have the passion for diving every day and the patience for managing people.
For me, it was the perfect first chapter in my post-work life. It gave me structure, pushed me physically. It made me comfortable in being generous with spending if it brightens people’s lives, and reminded me that even in the middle of a dive course, your portfolio can move by six figures and you need to walk into the dive centre as if nothing happened. That is the kind of autonomy I worked for.