How did you start SCUBA diving?

[Fish-R-Man]

I grew up at the beach in S Cal. Sea Hunt was one of my favorite shows. When I was about 9 or 10, my dad was diving. I had watched him set his gear up a couple times, so my brother and I figured we could do it. The next thing you know we were in the pool hanging out on the bottom. He always wondered what happened to the air in the tank until he came home at lunch one day and I was on the bottom of the pool with his gear on.

He taught me how to actually use the gear and as soon as I as old enough, I took my first YMCA course. Been doing it ever since....

 

[koozemani]

I grew up watching JYC as a kid. Jump ahead 25 years and my gf(now wife and dive buddy) got us ow classes as an Xmas present. The rest is history.

It was always something I wanted to do, but never got around to doing it.

 

[cbm32]

Never considered scuba diving at all. Just never crossed my mind to try it. Became disabled/retired and suddenly had some time to travel while trying to learn to walk again. Went to Kauai while still using a power chair for all but very short distances, and for those I had to use a cane. Decided to listen to the presentation about Scuba at the pool and got sucked into trying on the stuff in the pool. Went under the first time and didn't come up for over a half an hour. The deeper I went the less pain I felt in my back. When the DM finally made me surface I told him I thought this was for me and as soon as I got clearance from my Dr. faxed to the resort I started OW class. Quickly found that I wasnt handicapped once I went underwater and the deeper I went (at least up to about 25-30 feet) the less pain I felt in my back (at that point it stopped decreasing but was hardly noticeable).

Now I haven't used my power chair for about 18 months but the only place I am relatively pain free is when diving. Getting very close to 100 dives and will be diving until the day they dump my ashes into the ocean (maybe I will have in my will that someone has to log that as my final dive )

 

[formula1mb@aol.com]

I've always been fascinated by the ocean and thought about trying scuba one day but always seemed so exotic and expensive. 3 years ago, I lost my job and had a ton of free time, so I went looking around in the ROP catalog to see what they had----then to my surprise, I saw they had a scuba program so figured what the hell! I have all the time in the world and can get certified for free Ended up being one of the best things I ever did. It was an actual real program, several months long so I learned it for real and no quickie program, got my advanced and rescue.

Now I'm working and have almost no free time so not diving nearly as much

Funny how it works sometimes, if I never lost that first job out of college, probably would have never learned to dive or at least not for a couple more years. Now if I could just get some more free time and vacation time.......

Robert

 

[Mantra]

I'm with Hawkwood. My father in law is a really avid diver, and my wife has always wanted to try it. I, on the other hand, would never have considered this on my own. I had a bad experience as a kid, and have always felt a bit self-conscious around the water since. We did our OW stuff at the start of this year, and - wow. The nervousness soon went away, and being able to enjoy the water for the first time was just a complete revelation. Then we did our OW dives on the Liberty wreck at Tulamben, saw garden eels and a big whirlwind of Trevally, and I became more hooked on the sport than the missus!

I love nature, and there is no better place to get up close to wild animals in amazing variety and quantity than underwater. I hate to be *that* guy, but having a whole new world open up like this has been the most special thing.

 

[freewillie]

For years I spent all my time on vacations snorkeling. One year when I was 17 in Great Barrier Reef I said I had to get certified but I never got around to actually taking lessons. Fast forward about 25 years.

Two years ago when back at Great Barrier Reef my wife signs us up for intro to scuba . She hated it, I loved it. This time went home and signed up for classes.

Last year diving Caribbean my daughter does intro to scuba as well. Long story short she wound up finishing her OW cert on that same vacation. She is now my vacation dive buddy and ironically we are in Hawaii diving right now. Just did Molokini crater, did a night dive, and will head to Kona in few days to do Manta ray dive. I know, life's tough but somebody's got to dive it!

 

[Dam0]

We booked a trip to Mexico (Playa del Carmen) for a friends wedding (we're from the UK) and the wedding got cancelled but we couldn't cancel the flights so we committed ourselves to an holiday. This was June.

I keep saltwater fish and thought it a good opportunity to see them in the wild, so paid a visit to the LDS.

Hooked, now doing advanced course.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk 2

 

[technicalbeast]

YO///// we all share same story ......swimming in sea water was my dream and i always wanted to see whats inside that deep blue water... so i was always searching my encyclopedia about scuba diving......so one day i found an advertisement in newspaper about scuba diving and i called them after a long call ........the fees was out of budget and totally out of range...let me tell you......... very little people know about scuba diving in our country....about 1.1% ......so i was refused....... and the time passed................and i forgot about about what the hell was scuba diving.........but iwas visiting beach every week ..........after five years later me and my dad were talking about my activities and my dad said why dont you go for a scuba diving course and i said No......just we were talking i went for an important paper to further discission i found an old diary.....i opened it up and found that there was that old contact number writen by my own hand five year earlier ...i gave that number to my dad ......and he talked to that instructor.........the other day i went to see the dive shop ...the instructor gave me a brief info about scuba diving so i signed up and became an open water scuba diver in 23september 2011..and in coming september iam goin for advance then rescue and for dive master.............that was my little story......... I SALUTE MY DAD

 

[ADeadlierSnake]

Ive always been fascinated with the underwater world, and one day, my family was planning a vacation to Hawaii and my father asked me if I wanted to get certified with him. Most expensive decision I have ever made!

 

[spectrum]

I was always fascinated by diving and any TV show (Sea hunt, Cousteau, Primus, Flipper) or movie in the 60's got my attention. As a kid I loved snorkeling in the ocean here n Maine and had a pretty good duck dive even as a kid.

The diving community around here is not a big one. When I may have had the cash to try I really didn't know where to start and not having an athletic bone in my body I wondered if I could even do it. Eventually it was a family and other priorities that overshadowed the desire to dive.

When we started camping with the kids (~1995) I got a decent snorkel gear package and it became part of the camping gear. I was in the water every chance I got and after being out of the water for about 25 years it was like I never stopped.

That was all good fun until 2003 when a daughter wanted to do some body surfing late in the season. We snapped up a few 3mm wetsuits to ward off the chill and went out to play. The next June I wondered how that suit might extend my skin diving and I began to be more ambitious. It was like a doorway opened and within a month I had a full new set of skin-diving gear, 5mm suit, weights, the works. My wife wasn't going to be left behind and she geared up too. That summer I logged 100+ skin-dives, some hours long.

By late that summer scuba didn't seem like that big of a leap. Being here on ScubaBoard I learned that 21st century scuba training didn't seem that intimidating. I made a discover dive (shallow pond open water) as a bucket list item, and loved it. I announced that I would start OW that winter to certify in spring 2005, you guessed it, she followed too.

We certified that spring (2005) and logged 100+ dives for a few years. Over time I have tempered the obsession a little. There are just so many cool things to do around here that I needed to seek some balance. Warm water travel has been infrequent, diving locally for the most part. 50 dives or so local dives seems to be a good number for me now.

So that's our story. The point I wanted to make is that done as a progression through skin-diving adaptation was very easy. By the time I touched a regulator and BC getting into a wetsuit, handling weights, propulsion and steering with fins, having a masked face in the water and sustained oral breathing were all second nature. Just add scuba!

Pete