My first scuba dive.

[elmer fudd]

After skimming through the intervention thread below, I thought I might give the details of my own first scuba dive.

To begin with, I wasn't certified. A friend of mine had found an old steel 72, (1966), and an old Sherwood Magnum regulator at a garage sale for $10. He passed it on to me, and since the pressure gauge said it had 500 psi in it, (practically full right?), and I had more testosterone than brains in those days I decided to take it out and dive it.

So, not having a wetsuit, I took it out in a mudflat bay in South Puget Sound on a summer day, waded out into about 4' of water and spent the next 5 or 10 minutes swimming around in chest deep water until I either got too cold or too bored and came back up.

That's it. Nothing happened, except it did whet my appetite to actually learn how to dive. When I think back on it, the thing I wonder most about is the air in the tank. Man, that stuff must have been old! The visual inspection sticker was dated 1973 and I probably did this around 1997 or so.

 

[TSandM]

Great story!

The man whose name is on my OW card had been diving, actively, for three years before he got certified.

We've become a very risk-averse society.

 

[Teamcasa]

Thanks for sharing that story.

A number of us began diving before (we could afford) certification.

 

[Chris Hipp]

I'm sure more people would be diving without c-cards if there were still dive shops that would rent gear or fill tanks without carding. I suppose it is an effective racket.

Oh and the air I am breathing is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5 billion years old. :cool2:

 

[elmer fudd]

Yeah, that old air didn't seem to do me any harm, but you couldn't pay me to do it again.

 

[Dave1981]

The man whose name is on my OW card had been diving, actively, for three years before he got certified

you really should get your own OW card!

 

[Drewski]

Yeah, that old air didn't seem to do me any harm, but you couldn't pay me to do it again.

DUDE! Led Zeppelin's 1973 North American Tour visited Seattle in July of 1973. Maybe some of the air in that cylinder could could provide "inspiration" for today's less talented musical genre? Ship it to Motown, LOL....

 

[Spimon]

If the OP was breathing the same things as Led Zeppelin inhaled in 1973, it would have been quite a dive indeed!

 

[Superlyte27]

I remember my first dive. A few hours before I met this old guy who looked like Colonel Sanders putting in fence posts behind a bar in Eustis, FL. He had a dive sticker on his beat up van. We got to talking and I shared my interest about learning to dive. He said he could teach me and i was excited to learn.

So... add a few hours and a few sets of gear and I'm in a pitch black Lake Swatara with a complete stranger who incidentally was not an instructor.

We made 47 dives in the upcoming weeks before it started getting more and more difficult to sneak into Florida's spring systems without a valid cert. card. Thankfully, back then they were easy to counterfeit.

 

[Herk_Man]

I dove for 15 years all over the world (1994-2009) without being certified. Glad I finally got my cert but had a blast being sneaky. (This is not to be taken as encouragement by anyone out there to do the same. I had training, just not from an agency certified source.)