Overseas Branches - A Conundrum

[Steve Atkins]

Overseas Branches ? A Conundrum

Dear fellow BSAC members,

I am the Dive Officer for Branch 51, the Jamaica Sub-Aqua Club, BSAC?s first overseas branch. Since being formed in 1957 our membership has risen and fallen with the seasons and people on expatriate contracts. Over recent years our numbers have averaged 15 and we are currently finding it hard to draw-in new members. With such a small membership we do not have a diver-training programme to help improve our viability, in the face of the PADI competition.

The situation is compounded by the fact that we appear to have very little in return from BSAC HQ UK ? we receive little response from telephone calls and emails, while letters are a write-off. We had thought that we could entice new members with the third party insurance liability, but it seems that this not the case. Last year we had 66 club dives off the Jamaican coast, all without incident. However, as most of our boat diving is made from local fisher boats or canoes, our third party buddy insurance cover is invalidated, as quite naturally, these fishermen carry no insurance. Another point to note is that in the unlikely event that a third party claim is made, the odds are that they would be brokered under US or Canadian jurisdiction, again invalidating BSAC?s support to its Jamaican members.

We are questioning if it is worthwhile continuing to dive under the BSAC banner. I wonder if any other club, or member, has successfully addressed these problems without undermining its BSAC affiliation.

Any comments would be gratefully received.

Regards

[Adrian Kelland]

I don't know who you see as your market, but clubs in the UK also have competition from PADI setups, and other branches of BSAC and so on.

Most UK clubs arn't able to train people in a week or so, a la holiday course, I assume you are the same. I can't see you competing in this market, unless you don't have to work for a living. So is you market those who live in Jamaica? I think you will have to look at yourselves first, this seems especailly true in regard to the insurance question... I don't know how other overseas branches handle this.

As to BSAC HQ, I have heard that it can be a black hole, but I have never suffered from this myself. I have always had promp replies to my questions. Perhaps they dont really know how to handle your enquiry. I hear that far too many enquiries end up with the NDO, but Jim Watson is probably the person to contact. <a href="mailto:technical@bsac.com">technical@bsac.com</a>

I hope you get this sorted.

Adrian

[Patrick Millar]

Overseas Branches ? A Conundrum

Dear fellow BSAC members,

I am the Dive Officer for Branch 51, the Jamaica Sub-Aqua Club, BSAC?s first overseas branch. Since being formed in 1957 our membership has risen and fallen with the seasons and people on expatriate contracts. Over recent years our numbers have averaged 15 and we are currently finding it hard to draw-in new members. With such a small membership we do not have a diver-training programme to help improve our viability, in the face of the PADI competition.

The situation is compounded by the fact that we appear to have very little in return from BSAC HQ UK ? we receive little response from telephone calls and emails, while letters are a write-off. We had thought that we could entice new members with the third party insurance liability, but it seems that this not the case. Last year we had 66 club dives off the Jamaican coast, all without incident. However, as most of our boat diving is made from local fisher boats or canoes, our third party buddy insurance cover is invalidated, as quite naturally, these fishermen carry no insurance. Another point to note is that in the unlikely event that a third party claim is made, the odds are that they would be brokered under US or Canadian jurisdiction, again invalidating BSAC?s support to its Jamaican members.

We are questioning if it is worthwhile continuing to dive under the BSAC banner. I wonder if any other club, or member, has successfully addressed these problems without undermining its BSAC affiliation.

Any comments would be gratefully received.

Regards


We in Mauritius went through the same sort of thing a few years back. We first and foremost tried to bring back old members back to diving with us by doing a lot of adventurous dives as we felt that our members had left through boredom. The next thing we did was to increase the social side of the club to attract new members. We did this by allowing social members and pushing our members to invite their non diving friends as well as PADI and other divers. This increased our pool of divers. and allowed a greater variation of dives giving a bit for everyone. We were lucky enough to have our own clubhouse which helped and allowed us to throw parties always with the idea of increasing our pool of divers. Once we had sufficient divers we brought out a National Instructor to run all sorts of SDC's. This attracted the non BSAC divers to the courses which they had to becme members of BSAC and have SALT's to do. the courses were so much better than the training that they had had before that many continued with the BSAC system. At the same time we has the NI form some Instructors which incresed our autonomy in Training thiswas done over several years and we now have a vibrant active club again. Irt is a hard slog but well worthwhile in the long run.