How you met scuba diving

[Tony387]

After I quit drinking, and dropped 100lbs, I was looking for something that would keep me active and that I could be passionate about. I was driving by my LDS one day, and decided to stop in. Now, I dive every weekend at a local lake and am looking forward to my first saltwater dive in August. Diving has become a very important part of my life, and while I wish I had started earlier, I look forward to many more years of this wonderful sport.

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[El Graduado]

When I was a kid, I would free dive in our backyard pool, twisting old wires and short lengths of iron pipes to the ladders or drain grate, pretending I was an “underwater demolition expert” preparing to blow up a bridge or something. I am sure I picked this up from Sea Hunt, one of my favorite programs at the time. In 1959, my family took our yearly summer vacation to Acapulco, but instead of the beach-front Hotel Pierre Marques, that time we stayed at the hill-top Hotel Las Brisas. I remember hating the pink cherubs and pink jeeps and pink everything, but I fell in love with snorkeling at La Concha Beach Club down on the shore below the hotel. I would ride down the hill to the beach club every morning with the waiters in the back of a hotel pick-up truck and then hangout at the Arnold Brothers’ dive shop there, helping put away equipment, asking dumb questions and generally being a pest. It all worked out though, because the day before we checked out, Alfonso Arnold gave me my first scuba lesson. I didn’t get to blow up anything, but it did give me my first taste of what it was like to stay down longer than I could hold my breath.

We shifted our vacations to the Bahamas after that and I got to dive in much clearer waters. I didn't go back to Acapulco until the 1970s, but I looked up Alfonso and we reconnected. Later, I was able to host him for a stay when he came to visit in Cozumel.

Good memories!

 

[Lost down under]

I made some poor decisions in my early teen, moving out of home and spending too much time with older girls (every teenage boys dream surely?) and all that kind of stuff. Three times a week or so I'd head out with mates and swim a good distance out on crappy surfboards to an outer reef and snorkel along it, it was a way to escape the situation I'd created and have a quick chat with the local turtles about my problems. Diving was just a progression of that and I often still dive for much the same reason, to get away from it all.

I miss those early days, everyday was an adventure.

 

[ciardi23]

Scuba has always interested me since I was a kid as well as the ocean. Something like the ocean, so big and unexplored, just pulled me right in. There is nothing like taking your first breath underwater. Hooked from the start.

 

[victor]

A mixture of watching every natural history program on UK TV I could in the 60's and spotting a BSAC scuba club at University.
I was hooked but work got in the way for some years.
Took it up again in 1990 and I have been diving every since.
Still have my original mask from 1970. Real Retro.

 

[gbf]

1968, at the ripe old age of 15, most Fridays after school we'd (3 teenagers) take the ferry to the north jetty in Port Aransas, Texas. We'd spend the weekend camped out there to fish for sharks. The first order of business was to "catch bait", that is, snorkel around the jetty and spear some sheepheads.

I could see the bigger and better "targets" beyond my breath-hold range, and really really wanted to go there - I was hooked.

I scrounged and saved the cash to buy some jetfins, booties, mask/snorkel, and a pole spear (still have all except the booties). Then, in 1975 upon graduation from college I scrounged and saved to do OW certification, using the same mask and fins.

My first non-instructor-led dive trip (a month after cert) was to Vortex Springs, FL, where my second dive ever was a cave/deco dive with a NACD diver I met there (guy who was supposed to be my "buddy" didn't want to dive). Talk about the ultimate trust-me dive. The NACD guy became my regular cave diving buddy, and we continued cave diving until 1990 when I gave it up.

Somehow we survived (I did both nacd and nsscds certs along the way, but real credit goes to mentoring by what are now some of the legendary names in cave diving), and now I do strictly open/warm water dives with my family, and no, they don't do it the way I did it.

 

[Bogtrotter]

In the 70's after seeing such movies as Jaws and The Deep, since have had a fascination with fish and marine life. Snorkelled a lot in the 80's and finally took the plunge into scuba in 1999. Still trying to figure out why Robert Shaw dove in slacks and button-down shirt.

 

[Texasguy]

When I was a kid, in 1959, my family took our yearly summer vacation to Acapulco, but instead of the beach-front Hotel Pierre Marques, that time we stayed at the hill-top Hotel Las Brisas. I remember hating the pink cherubs and pink jeeps and pink everything...

Boy, I'd kill for such a vacation when I was a kid. You are really privileged, you know. Well, one man's garbage is another man's dream, what can you do.

 

[rocdoc]

I am constantly looking for new ways to express my midlife crisis. This seemed a perfect opportunity. Then I was lucky enough to discover that dear old friends were avid divers, so I could plan trips with them. It started initially as a "let me try this as the activity for this summer", and turned into "this is awesome and I want to keep doing it, and come to think of it it's something I would have dreamed of doing since childhood had I had access to it and because Jaques Cousteau and sharks and octopi"

 

[Hank49]

Moved to the Philippines from Hawaii in 1986. Since there was inconsistent to no surf where I lived in the Philippines……