How you met scuba diving

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

My parents used to have a place near Tobermory, Ontario and I knew there was a lot of diving there and thought it would be cool someday.
In 2001, my wife and I bought a last minute vacation at the Iberostar resort in Cozumel, and I decided to give scuba a try and signed up for the one-day resort course. On our first dive, we say a large nurse shark, a spotted eagle ray, a turtle and so much more. I still get the video from that dive out once in a while and still marvel at how much we saw on that dive (while cringing at my technique!). Before that first dive had ended, I had decided to sign on for an open water course when I got home. The trip was in February that year, I was certified by the end of May.
 
My dad started diving in 1987 and then paid for me to get certified the next year--I was 18 years old. We dove together exactly twice the next summer and then he stopped diving soon after. I was an occasional (VERY occasional) vacation diver with a total of 14 dives by 2012 when my wife & I took our kids to Maui. I wanted to dive again now that the kids were old enough for me to abandon the family while I took a refresher course. Instead, I ended up taking the kids on a discover scuba dive--a decent way to get a refresher while the kids got introduced to scuba. Our daughter thought the dive was 'okay', my wife hasn't been deeper than wading calf deep in years, but our son (12 years old at the time) LOVED it and was/is a complete natural in the water.

At depth in Molokini Crater on his first open water dive ever, his mask started to leak. He calmly looked up and followed our instructor's advice on how to clear his mask--and screwed it up and completely flooded his mask. I was expecting panic and a quick end to our dive, but he just tried again to clear it--correctly this time--and continued diving. I had to shake him to get his attention to check if he was okay. He gave me the 'okay' sign back, but his facial expression clearly said, 'Stop bugging me, Dad. There's fish to look at!' I knew I had a future dive buddy, and our instructor for the day agreed by telling me, 'You have to get that kid certified!'

For his birthday, right after that trip, I paid for his Jr. Open Water at our LDS. We did a few dives last summer/fall on rental gear, then bought our own gear over the winter, starting with HOG BPW & regs from Jim Lapenta (Thanks, Jim!). After a slow start this spring, we now have a dozen dives on our new gear. We've connected with a good group of divers here in BC's Okanagan Valley and try to dive two or three times each week. Locally, it's all cold water, low vis, lake diving, but we are hoping for a warm water vacation in March, 2015 for spring break.
 
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.

I am sorry if I sounded like I didn't know how incredibly lucky I was to have been born at the time, in the country, and to the parents I was born to when I complained about the pink décor of Las Brisas! I know I was exposed to a lot of great adventures early on that many kids didn't get a chance to experience, and I am very grateful to my parents for those times. Not all my vacations needed to be "high on the hog" to have been memorable, though. One of my best vacations ever was at age six, when my grandparents took me along with them, camping out in their Nash every night as we drove the back roads of northern and central Mexico collecting minerals.

Have you changed your mind about coming back to Cozumel to do a shore dive?
 
First dive 1994, then sometimes some dives, but no cert. My first cert was in august 2010. Then I decided where I was born for: diving, did some certs like nitrox, aow, rescue, dm, normoxic trimix, full trimix, instructor, ccr, full trimix ccr, full cave. I really like diving.
 
The only reason I got myself involved in water sports(swimming, jetsking , scuba, freediving.
is because of a little story I heard when I was a child. A stroy told to us by my father:
He told us he had always wanted to be a diver but never became one and that all his friends learned how to swim except him that made him feel little ashamed of himself .
I was very young when I heard this story, but when I got older sth similar happended to me, everybody I went with to sports club learned how to swim except for me
I felt mabe it was sort of "genetic" trait that runs through the family; not being able to swim.

However three years ago , I had a good swimming instructor who finally managed to teach me how to swim and perfectly well for that matter.
after that I promised myseld that since the " spell" has been removed , I should go ahead and continue with all other water sports that I can learn
and SCUBA DIVING was at the top of that list.:D
 
Last edited:
What a nice thread! Love reading all the stories. Jacques Cousteau was such a great influence on me on so many others! The only thing my husband and I were good at in high school and college was swimming. We loved the water but lived miles from any ocean. My father dived in near by lakes and introduced us to diving in the late 70's. We dabbleed during college, got married, had 4 kids, continued to dabbled, kids grew and went off. We got more serious in our late 40's and 50's. Now in our early 60's have so much fun diving together. Hope it continues for many years to come.
 
Great thread.

My family spent at least two weeks camping by the sea every summer from as far back as I can remember. We would snorkel, fish and muck round in a little dinghy every day. (and watch Jacques Cousteau documentaries i n the winter) At the age of 14 (1981 or so) a CMAS 1 star SCUBA course was offered as an extra-curricula activity at school so my older brother and I did it together. Shortly after this he bought an old Landrover that became our dive trip transport and the two of us (by then 15 and 17 years old) would disappear for a day or a weekend to go shore diving).

When I was at university I joined the Auckland University Underwater Club (aka dive club) and continued to SCUBA dive - a lot (and I served on the club committee as well as doing one year as club president, doing AOW and Rescue Diver also)). While at university I got hooked into underwater hockey - this kept me in the loop with some lifelong friends and we all went diving.

I should also add that I have recently (about 3 or 4 years ago) got hooked on free diving and actually (shock, horror) sold my tanks, bought decent free diving fins etc. Free diving I get to see pretty much everything a recreational SCUBA diver sees and I can spend a lot longer in the water (and along the way learnt how to equalise quickly when finning down).
 
As a kid, I lived a mile or two outside of a small fishing village near some tidewater glaciers. Boating, fishing and aquaculture were a big deal. A useful and practical thing for a grown man to aspire to get was a license to fly a floatplane. The general opinion up north was that getting in the water was about as safe as laying down on the railroad tracks in front of the train, but not quite as dangerous as being attacked by a bear.

We moved to California, but away from the coast. That hurt. A lot. At least we had a pool. It was beautiful. Hypnotic, shimmering. I was deeply skeptical of it. We also got (long after everyone else on earth had one) an amazing thing called a "color television". It was even more entrancing than the pool. Watching The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau was delightful agony. I couldn't swim, was leery of the water, but the urge to explore the depths grew into a burning, intense ache.

One summer, I was given a choice: get a banana seat bike, or a snorkel set. Even today, the sight of a blue Voit duck fin makes me smile involuntarily, helplessly. I'm grinning like a fool right now.

I got more comfortable wearing a mask and fins, but I was still a tourist who only rarely left the top three feet of the water column.

In high school, the truly cool kids would ditch classes in the late spring and head for a nearby mountain lake. At this point, I was too busy building hot rods to care about much of anything else, so I never went. My dreams of deep water had to stay in hibernation until after I graduated.

Diving was a required skill for my MOS, but just as another form of transportation. After I got out, I moved away from the ocean a second time. The surface interval was like a geological era, and the separation hurt like a divorce.

Now I live in California again. I have no recreational cert and only mismatched, tired-looking secondhand gear. I stopped trying to dive with/around color coordinated divers a long time ago. I have plenty of fun solo, but I do miss the precision of working with a highly trained team, and the complex adventures that become possible when everybody has memorized a plan and knows exactly what to do.

I have never taken a proper dive vacation, where multiple days are devoted to dives on multiple nice sites. That's why I chose a preschooler in water wings for my avatar. I'm still just barely getting into the sport. The stories that I read here about Cozumel/Lembeh/Whitefish/etc might as well have been written about The Land of Oz. That kind of diving sounds like fantasy, almost too good to be true. I would have to be ripped out of my current life by a tornado to get there.
 
"Sea Hunt" on TV back in the 50s . . . .

Safe dives . . . . . .
. . . safer ascents !

the K
 
I´d love to know how others found their passion :)

My uncle was a marine biologist and he worked at the university where I went to study. I had seen the ocean before on vacations but I grew up pretty much literally in the middle of nowhere in the Rocky Mountains and had only seen scuba diving on TV.

My uncle helped me get connected to the student union and arrange for a local dive shop to come and give lessons. 6 weeks in the university pool and 6 dives in open water. The course was given by a commercial diver who gave PADI lessons on the side. As a side note he eventually went on to become one of PADI Canada's bobo's.

As for me, I was a water baby. During school vacations my mother used to take us to the lake with my cousins, aunt and grandmother and our fathers would come on the weekends after work. My grandmother was a lifeguard in her younger years and she taught us how to swim. We would literally take our "morning dip" every day by swimming clear across the lake and back again. (it was a small lake but to a child the task looked daunting).

My first experience on scuba changed me forever. I had snorkeled before but my first time underwater able to breathe was instantly addictive. I couldn't get enough. I found learning to dive relatively straightforward apart from the struggle to dial in buoyancy control to where it needed to be, which is a common problem. It never bothered me, however, and I eventually became very proficient at it. I dove a lot with my uncle and his friends/colleagues to begin with. I was going to university so I couldn't dive more than once a week (thankfully they bankrolled it). I had a 60 hour study schedule so I could have every Sunday free for diving. When he died I nearly stopped diving but picked it up again a few years later after meeting some new people.

As luck would have it, I wasn't very good with women so aside from studying and diving my life didn't have many distractions. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that kind of simplicity.

Fast forward to today. I'm an instructor sharing the sport for the first time with others and helping them on their own journey of becoming the diver they want to be. I never set out to become an instructor but took a DM course together with some friends as an extension of helping out with rescue courses (something I've been doing since the mid 80's). I DM'd for a long time but eventually had the opportunity to take the instructor training and make my own mistakes instead of mopping up behind others. I found out that being the instructor isn't as easy as it looks from the "peanut gallery" but have committed myself completely to being the best instructor I can possibly be. At any point in time I'm always improving and feeling like my previous students deserved better.

My own diving these days is all, or pretty much all, technical. At least locally. On vacations I try to stick to the NDLs and I'm still as happy as ever to dive in groups and tag along with other (newer) divers. At some point almost everyone seems like a newer diver. I actually mentioned this to a friend of mine who is an instructor just last weekend. He's been diving for 11 years and has about 1500 dives. He's a good instructor and I've seen him grow up from a new OW diver to the confident and competent professional he is today. I even ask him for advice from time to time. I said to him, "that's a good start", which after the laughter and joking lead to me realizing that there is a state that goes beyond a "passion for diving" that starts to define your identity.

R..
 

Back
Top Bottom