Your First Time

[Paladin]

When/where was your first time diving with SCUBA? How did this come to be? This is an offshoot of RickI's "Vintage Diving Stories" thread and is primarily intended for stories which took place before 1980.

C'mon, guys, let's hear your stories!

 

[Akimbo]

When/where was your first time diving with SCUBA? How did this come to be?

1962, the Breakwater in Monterey, California. I was 11 and my parents drove me down from the San Francisco Bay Area. Probably more interesting than the dive was how I got there.

My dad made the mistake, after my relentless badgering, of telling me that he would not only let me learn to dive he would pay for the gear and the lessons if I could swim the length of the local high school racing pool on one breath (no fins). I was a very skinny 10 years old. In hindsight I now realize he didn't think I could make it until I was maybe 16 and I would probably forget the whole thing by the time I discovered girls.

I could barely make it half way across the pool that summer. Twenty-five yards seemed like a mile. I trained hard over the next year and happened to go through the biggest growing streak in family history (slight exaggeration). I could hold my breath 3:20 (minutes:seconds) static by the time the pool opened the next summer and do 50 push-ups. I still remember what the other end of the pool felt like when I made it that summer afternoon.

Dad honored his commitment, but (big surprise) I had a hard time finding someone who would take me in their class. About 100 phone calls and a swimming test later I was in somebody's backyard pool learning to clear a mask. I was so stoked that I didn't realize until years later how everyone else in the class was weirded-out by this little kid. Being able to hold my breath about twice as long as the adults got me accepted though. Thanks Dad.

So, time-shifting back to the start of the story, I found myself on the beach at one of the most heavily dove spots on California's central coast. Abandoned canneries (as in Cannery Row) were boarded up but accessible by sea. We did a lot of snorkeling in the kelp that morning and burned up a tank that afternoon.

As I remember, the gear was:

• Voit single 50 with reserve valve complete with pull rod and a double hose regulator
• An off the rack 3/16" skin-2 wetsuit that fit like a pair of coveralls -- classic diaphragm height pants, brass zipper, and snaps on the beavertail. Yes, I was covered with powder and put a small rip in it the first time.
• Voit Viking fins with full foot pockets. For some reason those triangular fin grippers/keepers were called Fixi-Palms -- no idea why or if the spelling is even close. They were mandatory since nothing fit.
• Standard round mask with attached snorkel
• Weight belt with double D-ring quick release
• Horse-collar with CO2 cartridge & oral inflator
• I am pretty sure I had a depth gauge at that point
• A no-name "diving watch" purchased at the local drug store to time breath-hold training.
• Mike Nelson knife, probably on the weight belt.

I tagged along with two old guys in the class (like seniors in high school) and got inside one of the canneries. Seagull crap must have been 6" thick and it smelled like a seal lion ho-house -- at least I remember it that way. There were rusting canning machines, boxes of labels, and rotted floor boards. What a kick. I slept the whole two hour drive back to the Bay Area.

 

[David Wilson]

For some reason those triangular fin grippers/keepers were called Fixi-Palms — no idea why or if the spelling is even close. They were mandatory since nothing fit.

Fixe-palmes. They were invented and patented in the early 1960s by Beuchat, a diving equipment company in the Mediterranean port of Marseilles, hence the French name. The name "fixe-palmes" derives from "fixer", meaning "to secure", and "palmes", meaning "fins". Fin grips, triangular rubber straps worn over the heel, arch and instep with full-foot fins, remain popular with snorkellers, freedivers and underwater hockey players. The latter frequently opted for fin grips in bright colours:

However, the principal source, the "Rainbow Nation" of South Africa, now only produces them in black. Fin grips are still made in colours other than black in Japan, but sadly they aren't exported to the West.

My own "first time" with scuba was in a swimming pool in my home town of Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England in 1970. I had joined the university British Sub-Aqua club at the beginning of the academic year when I began a postgraduate teacher-training course. I wore a pair of British-made Typhoon Rondine full-foot fins, an oval rubber-skirted mask of French manufacture and a Typhoon snorkel with a blue rubber mouthpiece. I had completed my snorkel training at my previous university in the Yorkshire city of Leeds but had never had the time to proceed to scuba because of the heavy workload of my modern foreign languages BA course. I can't remember the name of the regulator (we called them demand valves) supplied by the club, just that it was double-hose. I submerged in the pool under supervision, but surfaced soon afterwards, spluttering. The tank I had been given was very low on air, so my pool dive had to be abandoned. In the event, I never returned because my teacher-training course proved to be even more demanding on my time than my undergraduate course.

I enjoyed my very brief encounter with scuba almost four decades ago, but I've never been tempted to do any water pursuit other than snorkelling since then. I first snorkelled in the late 1950s in those glorious days when public swimming pools permitted youngsters to use masks, fins and snorkels. At school I always preferred academic subjects. I was hopeless at woodwork and team sports and I still can't ride a bike, leading me to believe that I'm probably dyspraxic. Always being the last to be chosen in team sports such as rugby and cricket and showing little talent for athletics either, I was keen to try swimming, especially because the school I attended had its own swimming pool. Swimming lessons seemed to be all about grasping the sides and kicking hard but the skills never translated in my case into swimming for real. I seemed doomed to remain in the shallow end while the vast majority of my classmates swam like fish. Then, one day in the late 1950s, I read about snorkelling and asked my parents to get me a mask, a snorkel and a pair of fins. The fins were pale blue Britmarine Clippers, if I remember correctly, with adjustable heel straps, designed to be worn barefoot, the mask a green Turnbull Australian import and the snorkel a Typhoon aluminium "S"-shape model with a blue mouthpiece on one end and a ping-pong ball valve on the other. The gear was magic. I finally managed to propel myself across the water in the pool without sinking to the bottom, thanks to the fins, while the mask kept the chlorinated water out of my eyes. After a while I found that I was also able to swim without the fins, mask and snorkel, but those items of gear did more for my current ability to swim than kicking at the side ever did.

Since then I've snorkelled in open water in many places around the world, starting in the Mediterranean and an East Berlin lake in the 1970s and graduating to La Jolla Cove near San Diego when I visited California during one of my States-side visits to my brother in Minneapolis. I now confine my snorkelling to the North Sea, 8 miles from where I live, and I'm enjoying the experience more than ever, now I'm in my sixties. I always snorkel with vintage-style gear, full-foot all-rubber fins, oval rubber-skirted mask, "J"-shaped snorkel with a rubber mouthpiece and a valve-less Hydroglove drysuit, every item reminiscent of the time when I began snorkelling, back in the late 1950s. "Something old, something new", as they say about wedding outfits. The same saying can also be true of what we wear in other circumstances. Just because something's new doesn't mean it's necessarily better for everybody!

 

[captain]

As a young boy in the early 1950's I was fascinated by anything related to water. Every summer my parents would spend a week at the beach and I always had my kiddie mask and fins swimming around in the surf. I would read all the National Geographic articles about Cousteau's adventures. We lived about 30 miles from downtown New Orleans and had to go into the city to shop. There was a store not far from where we parked the car called Roland's Army Surplus and Sporting Goods. The owner, Roland Reviere was a diver and one of the very first to bring scuba gear to New Orleans. He sold U S Divers gear and everytime we went to the city I would go to the store and stare at all the equipment and read the catalogs.
My brother who was 15 years older than me had built a swimming pool at his home in about 1955, it was the first and only pool in town at the time. I had graduated from my kiddie mask and fins to a real Squale mask, snorkel and Churchill fins and would spend hours in the pool with them. In 1957 I convinced my parents to let me buy a tank and regulator and I bought a Voit VR-2 with green hoses and mouthpiece and a Voit tank with green webbing harness with my odd job money. I spent many more hours in the pool practicing clearing hoses and mask, doing ditch and don, all the things in the instruction manual.
From the pool I went to Lake Pontchartrain which was a couple of miles from home. It was great to be diving in a real body of water even if visibility was only 6 or 8 feet on the best days and only 15 feet deep but it was real diving where I could see fish and crabs and maybe stumble across a long loss wreck or other treasures.
I graduated from high school in 1962 and my brother had a general hardware and sporting goods store and I went to work for him. I put in a diving department and became a U S Divers and Voit Swim Master dealer.
In 1967 I bought my first boat, an old 18 footer that opened up new diving opportunities such as the gulf oil rigs. Not being able to rent tanks without a certification card while on a trip to Puerto Rico to visit relatives lead me to taking the YMCA scuba course in 1970.
In 1969 with a new wife and a child on the way the store could not support two families so I took a job at local chemical plant but I remained part time at the store running the scuba department until my brother closed the store in 1973. I kept the left over stock which included a DA Aqua Master that is now converted to a Phoenix, and the compressor which I still use.
I put away the two hose regulators in the early 70's and made the switch to a single hose. I spent the 70's and the early 80's diving the Florida keys, Destin and the Louisiana oil rigs with a trip or two to Cozumel.
In 1983 my diving buddy and I decided to start a dive charter boat business out of Grand Isle, Louisiana. I got my USCG operators licence and ran the business until 1988 but working a regular job plus the charter boat took a toll. I had become somewhat burned out with diving and working at two jobs and for 5 years I had no desire to dive and sold the boat. I didn't dive for 10 years until in 1997 my wife and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean for our 30th wedding anniversary and I decided to bring my scuba gear along. That trip jump stated me diving again only this time it was with my now vintage gear from the 50's and 60's.

 

[Japper]

Following my BSAC training in 1969 under the auspices of the AFSouth NATO Sub Aqua Club in Naples, Italy I made my first dive on a boat trip one day at the shallow depth of 12 ft. on the underwater archaeological site of the sunken Roman city of Tripergola with an Italian friend's equipment consisting of a Technisub double hose regulator and twin steel 10 liter tanks using my own Cressi Rondine fins and oval mask.
You can now see the entire site from satellite view on Google Maps at maps.google.com with 40.828911, 14.094729 coordinates in the search criteria and zoom in.
As fascinating as it was to hover over ancient mosaic floors, opus laterizi walls, marble atrium pool, and collapsed roof tiles it was the amazement I experienced at the resumption of rush-hour traffic pattern of the fish once my sudden appearance no longer scared them into hiding that really got my attention.
Years later, a three year volunteer project spent attempting to map the layout of the submerged ruins culminated in the disappointing discovery that a group from Genova had already previously done so without publicly sharing any of their results. Sure would have been nice to have Google's satellite image back then since the authorities were unwilling to share any aerial photography of the area due to nearby sensitive military installations that were blacked out on the few inland pictures we were granted access to for establishing our shoreline compass coordinates.
I subsequently obtained my PADI certification in June 1976 with all new updated gear (I'm still using that same Conshelf regulator) and also spent time diving along the Amalfi coast with my father where we once found a Timex watch at 70 ft. that wound right up and kept on ticking - and it wasn't even a waterproof watch.