PirateFoxy
Contributor
I don’t dive and mostly plan to lurk, but I know myself and sooner or later I’ll end up chiming in on something random so I figured I might as well get an introduction out of the way as per the welcome message.
I found the board by way of someone linking to a thread in Accidents and since I’m very interested in safety and human factors I found a lot of the other threads interesting and signed up primarily to better keep track of which I’ve read and which have new posts and all of that useful stuff. (I have a non-traditional background in medicine and limited emergency response, plus for many years I rode horses which is also considered a relatively high-risk activity, as hobbies go, and I’ve found that you can learn a lot from what goes wrong and what attitudes people have in incidents even in unrelated activities, because the human part is always there.)
Since I’ve been reading I have warmed a little tiny bit to the idea of learning to dive - I have some health concerns (primarily controlled hereditary high blood pressure which seems to not be a significant issue if you are conservative and careful?) but the more significant barrier is concern I’d panic due to past experience as a kid with a really bad swimming ‘lesson’ that makes me get anxious when my head/face is under the water. I can swim fine on the surface if I keep my face mostly dry. It’s something I keep meaning to work on, just for various Life Reasons I haven’t had the time to do anything regularly which I think would be necessary to get less sensitive and build confidence. Even without diving I think getting highly stressed in fairly normal ‘in the water’ scenarios is not a terribly good plan if someone wants to spend time in the water, so it is definitely on the To Do list.
As far as diving, if I ever get that far my primary interest would likely be relatively shallow photography and general sight-seeing/marine life observing basic stuff in good visibility. My fiancé and I also have some thoughts about learning to sail and I gather from reading Cruiser Forum that some diving skills can be quite useful there, too, when it comes to things like in-water boat inspection/maintenance and checking your anchor, so that is in my mind also. (If I learned to dive my fiancé would probably look into it also. He’s also thought about it in the past but just had other stuff to be spending his hobby money on, so it wasn’t an area he pursued. We also don’t live in an area with lots of immediately inviting water to dive in - western PA rivers do not exactly say ‘come and see the sights! - much easier to put money and time into things that can be done locally like biking and hiking.)
Anyway, back to lurking.
I found the board by way of someone linking to a thread in Accidents and since I’m very interested in safety and human factors I found a lot of the other threads interesting and signed up primarily to better keep track of which I’ve read and which have new posts and all of that useful stuff. (I have a non-traditional background in medicine and limited emergency response, plus for many years I rode horses which is also considered a relatively high-risk activity, as hobbies go, and I’ve found that you can learn a lot from what goes wrong and what attitudes people have in incidents even in unrelated activities, because the human part is always there.)
Since I’ve been reading I have warmed a little tiny bit to the idea of learning to dive - I have some health concerns (primarily controlled hereditary high blood pressure which seems to not be a significant issue if you are conservative and careful?) but the more significant barrier is concern I’d panic due to past experience as a kid with a really bad swimming ‘lesson’ that makes me get anxious when my head/face is under the water. I can swim fine on the surface if I keep my face mostly dry. It’s something I keep meaning to work on, just for various Life Reasons I haven’t had the time to do anything regularly which I think would be necessary to get less sensitive and build confidence. Even without diving I think getting highly stressed in fairly normal ‘in the water’ scenarios is not a terribly good plan if someone wants to spend time in the water, so it is definitely on the To Do list.
As far as diving, if I ever get that far my primary interest would likely be relatively shallow photography and general sight-seeing/marine life observing basic stuff in good visibility. My fiancé and I also have some thoughts about learning to sail and I gather from reading Cruiser Forum that some diving skills can be quite useful there, too, when it comes to things like in-water boat inspection/maintenance and checking your anchor, so that is in my mind also. (If I learned to dive my fiancé would probably look into it also. He’s also thought about it in the past but just had other stuff to be spending his hobby money on, so it wasn’t an area he pursued. We also don’t live in an area with lots of immediately inviting water to dive in - western PA rivers do not exactly say ‘come and see the sights! - much easier to put money and time into things that can be done locally like biking and hiking.)
Anyway, back to lurking.