No Gloves?

In the past year, I’ve seen a number of domestic, USA dive instructors tell students that, “I like to recommend lightweight ‘reef’ gloves when diving around coral. Unfortunately, a lot of destinations won’t let you wear them.”

You most likely already know that dive operators at destinations such as Cayman and Bonaire prohibit the use of gloves (in some instances, wearing gloves is actually forbidden by law). What you may not understand is why.

Divers with poor buoyancy-control skills frequently want to use their hands to avoid crashing into delicate coral formations — but will only do so if their hands are somehow protected from contact with the “icky” coral. Unfortunately, in doing so, they kill any coral with which they come in contact.

If you prevent these divers from wearing gloves, they will tend to stay far enough away from the reef so that the chance of accidental contact is minimized. The result: Less dead coral and vastly healthier reefs.

This pisses off some narrow-minded dive store owners and instructors. All they see resulting from such policies is the loss of a sale worth, at best, around $20. What they fail to see is that healthier coral reefs attract more divers, resulting in the sale of significantly more regulators, BCs and dive computers. It can be a win-win situation for all concerned.

At the dive operation I managed in Maui, we didn’t prohibit the use of gloves — but we did strongly discourage it. Nevertheless, one young lady I remember insisted on wearing her pretty pink “reef” gloves. Sure enough, she got too close to the coral and felt compelled to fend herself off with her hands.

Guess what? She put her hand down right on top of an urchin. Do you think those fancy reef gloves prevented several of the spines from going right through her hand? (Do I even have to ask?) Ironically, if she’d been barehanded, this most likely wouldn’t have happened.

Again, folks, don’t bother to listen to us. What do we really know? We only dive here every day…

This isn’t California, Miss… »

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