How do so many folks have so many dives

[Mike]

I'm a bit perplexed at looking at some folks profiles and seeing the amount of dives listed. I wholly understand dive instructors.....they are in the water doing pool sessions, guiding students week in and out. What I dont understand is folks in the midwest who have 2000 dives.


Granted, im closing in on 5 years of diving. Surely a lot of folks eclipse me by many fathoms, year wise. Ill admit in relative terms, I am a new diver.

However, I have access to diving 365 days a year. For the most part, I have dove (minimally) every single weekend for the last four years.

Question posed. How do some folks have so many dives without access all of the times? Diving in January in Des Moines is not a reality.

Possibly....

 

[decompression]

When I was teaching and fun diving on the west coast for 15 years I averaged 4-6 dives a week. Never included pool dives. I stopped logging around 1000 but my student counts, tech dive logs, dive trips and averages put me around 2500. The last 5 years I've slowed down to about 100+ a year.


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[beaverdivers]

Question posed. How do some folks have so many dives without access all of the times? Diving in January in Des Moines is not a reality.

Simple, hop on a plane & travel. Live-aboards do provide a nice venue for logging a lot of hour long dives in a short time. We will be in Socorro in Jan., most divers in our group will bag close to 20 dives in a week.

We are also fortunate to have natural hot springs ( 90 degrees ) that are open year round. You can ski & dive in the same day.

The other factor is number of years of diving. 40+ years adds up, especially when many of those years may have been guiding or teaching.

 

[Rayallyn]

Why worry about amount of dives? Shouldn't you be worried about improving your skills or keeping skills current? It seems somewhat of a macho thing to brag about the number of your dives. Take guy with 50 dives who dives at least once a month vs a guy who claims 1000 dives and never stops talking about it' a good percentage of the time the guy who is constantly jabbering away is going to have problems. I have a lot of dives before I recertified but do not count those dives as I quit diving for quite a few years. After moving down to the keys it is hard to keep me out of the water.
If you are going for commercial diving or upping you certs then the amount of dives comes into question, but with recreational diving who cares as long as you are a competent diver and certified. Back when I started diving there was no requirement for certification and my recreational dives were not logged only my commercial dives were logged. You can find good divers with 25 to 50 dives and bad divers with 500 dives.

 

[rhwestfall]

Perhaps no other hobbies?????

 

[Mike]

Men like to round up. If it's 5 1/2 it's 6. If it's 6 1/4 it's 7....

 

[DeepSeaExplorer]

I'm skeptical too... I frequently hear people talking about how they have a thousand dives. It's pretty tough for someone that doesn't dive professionally to consistently do 100 dives per year. Probably, only the top 5% of divers can dive like that for 10 years. And, they would need to be a year round diver too, not just a warm weather diver. Only a percentage of divers are year-round divers or divers that will dive in less than ideal conditions. A fair weather diver would need to be in the water every weekend possible. I'm sure there are some out there doing it; but again, they're the top 5% of divers.

I've had some downtime recently due to an ear infection followed by remodeling a house. But, I've had a few 100 dive years in the not too distant past when I was consumed by diving. It's pretty hard to do 100/yr diving casually/occasionally. I live in one of the best dive locations in the US, Miami, with outstanding dive opportunity/weather/conditions, and I dive year-round. I've been diving in Miami since 1998, certified in the late 1980s. During that time, I've taken many a dive class to work up to full Trimix and cave. Look at my dive count. I will probably hit 900 some time next year if I can keep life from getting in the way...

 

[Colliam7]

I'm a bit perplexed at looking at some folks profiles and seeing the amount of dives listed. . . . However, I have access to diving 365 days a year. For the most part, I have dove (minimally) every single weekend for the last four years. . . . Question posed. How do some folks have so many dives without access all of the times?

Maybe, what you observe relates to your diving style, and that of (at least some) others.

Using your example, if we take you at your stated word - 'dove (minimally) every single weekend for the last 4 years', that would be 4 x 52 weekends, or 208 weekends. Factoring out 8 of those ('For the most part'), if you made one dive each weekend, you would have logged 200 dives, 2 dives each weekend would be 400, 3 dives would be 600, etc. Your profile indicates 200-499 dives, which suggest that diving only on weekends for the last 4 years, you would have averaged less than 3 dives a weekend. That doesn't take into consideration diving during the week (since you mention you have access 365 days a year). So, presumably, your diving style is roughly a couple of dives each weekend. That is great, it is probably comfortable, affordable (in terms of gas fills), and provides you with what you want from diving. Put another person in the Marshalls for 4 years, and they might log twice that, or three times that, or half that. The number would reflect their personal diving style. I spent a week on Bonaire several weeks ago, and logged 28 dives. Others in the group logged 10, or 20, or 30 in one case. The numbers were valid, and reflected the individuals' preferences. If I went to Bonaire 4 times a year, I would have a whole lot more logged dives than I do now, but that would be meaningful primarily to me. Maybe, some of the midwesterners with 2000 logged dives spent 5 years working in the Caribbean, before moving to Des Moines.

I still log quarry dives, whether I am teaching or not, in part because my logbook is my personal dive journal, and in part because that's what I started doing years ago, and haven't seen any reason to break the habit. I did a quarry dive yesterday, and recorded my maximum depth, my total submerged time, what I saw (a big paddlefish among other things), the fact that my drysuit was very much a wetsuit, the people I dove with, the fact that my scooter nosecone leaked, what cylinders I used, etc., etc. I don't view that as fluffing up numbers, or misrepresenting fact - it is what it is.

 

[DeepSeaExplorer]

You can find good divers with 25 to 50 dives and bad divers with 500 dives.

It's a rare individual that can do 500 dives and still not learn anything, but unfortunately they do exist. However, a more plausible explanation is that diver is lying to impress.

 

[ASA400]

I'm a bit perplexed at looking at some folks profiles and seeing the amount of dives listed. I wholly understand dive instructors.....they are in the water doing pool sessions, guiding students week in and out. What I dont understand is folks in the midwest who have 2000 dives.

Granted, im closing in on 5 years of diving. Surely a lot of folks eclipse me by many fathoms, year wise. Ill admit in relative terms, I am a new diver.

However, I have access to diving 365 days a year. For the most part, I have dove (minimally) every single weekend for the last four years.

Question posed. How do some folks have so many dives without access all of the times? Diving in January in Des Moines is not a reality.

I lived in Guam for about 6 months about 25 years ago. Here's how my diving went for that 6 months...2 boat dives on Saturday, 1-2 shore dives with a buddy on Sunday, 1 night dive on Wednesday and usually 1 solo dive sometime during the week. That's 4-6 dives a week. Add it up and it amounts to about 100-140 dives in 6 months. I have a friend who still lives on Guam and has for about 35 years. I can't imagine how many dives he has. But then, I was an underwater photographer and was looking for different animals on each dive. Back then we only had 35 frames per dive so if you wanted to get a lot of useable photos, you had to dive a lot.