Notes from the Water

On Sunday, aboard the boat bound for Sivriada, I had four introductory-dive students with me. One of them was still genuinely afraid of going underwater, yet kept returning every weekend despite it. This was their third attempt. And before every dive, the same question came first:

"You’ll film me, won’t you? You’ll take photos, won’t you?"

Before we had even entered the water, their mind was already somewhere beyond it — on how they would look, who would see them, which image they would share. The dive had not begun, and already it belonged to someone else.

We were at eighteen metres.

Visibility was good. There was no current. Nothing was “wrong.” My student was diving beside me, well balanced, breathing steadily. Moments earlier, he had completed a shallow-water exercise exactly as it was meant to be done: remove the mask, put it back on, clear the water. He had performed that movement dozens of times in the pool.

And in that moment, I suspected nothing.

Of all the work in dive education, training instructors may be the most consequential. Because when you train an instructor, you are not teaching one person to dive — you are shaping everyone they will ever teach. Get it wrong, and the damage doesn't stop with one person. The system itself enters a cycle: poorly trained instructors produce poorly trained divers, and some of those divers will one day stand in front of students of their own.

Current instructor training programmes operate under real constraints — limited time, fixed windows, measurable metrics. We have to decide, quickly, whether someone is ready to teach. And that decision rests almost entirely on technical skill and observable performance.

The process is familiar: candidates demonstrate skills at various levels. A fellow candidate playing the role of student makes deliberate errors; the instructor candidate is expected to catch and correct them. These things are necessary — I'm not arguing against them. But are they sufficient? That's the question we should all be asking.

Its official name is still Sivriada. But Istanbulites have called it something else for a century: Hayırsızada. The Isle of the Thankless. The Cursed Island. A place that bears such a name cannot simply be a dive site. Before entering the water, I found a corner of the crowded deck and stood looking out to sea — even as I checked my equipment, my mind was already elsewhere, back in the summer of 1910, and what truly happened there.

That year, Istanbul's streets were full of dogs. The stray dog population of the Ottoman capital had been part of the city's fabric for centuries; neighbourhoods claimed their own dogs, fed them, accepted them as a kind of urban ecosystem. But the winds of modernisation had begun to regard this as a problem unbecoming of a civilised capital. The municipal authorities of the day, anxious to present a Western face to the world, resolved to rid the streets of strays. Rather than slaughter them — which was itself a matter of controversy at the time — they chose exile. Eighty thousand dogs were rounded up, loaded onto boats, and left on this bare, waterless, shadowless rock in the middle of the Marmara.

Not a drop of fresh water. Not a tree. Not a crevice for shelter. Only stone, sun, and eighty thousand creatures with nothing in the world but each other.