SYRACUSE, N.Y.-
I never will forget those first moments as I sank below the surface of the water and tried to breathe.
Rapid, deep, nearly desperate snatches at air. I couldn’t get it fast enough. A classic sign of panic?
Saddled with 40 or so extra pounds and my arms and legs constricted in neoprene, I was sinking deeper and beginning to feel the squeeze building in my ears.
And this was only a 13-foot-deep pool. I remember thinking: “What have I gotten myself into?”
Diving has come a long way since French explorer Jacques Cousteau and his countryman Emile Gagnan, an engineer, first began pioneering scuba–self-contained underwater breathing apparatus–systems in the 1940s.
Today, there are more than 8.5 million certified scuba divers in the United States.
Because of the sport’s broadening appeal, the “typical” scuba diver is disappearing, said Doug McNeese, executive director of Scuba Schools International, based in Fort Collins, Colo., one of the country’s four principal diving schools.
It used to be a domain for males aged 35-50, typically professionals who could afford it and had the leisure time. A growing number of women are taking it up, McNeese said, and about 30 percent of scuba divers now are women.
More older teens and retirees also are learning to dive, said Kristin Valette, a spokeswoman for the Professional Association of Diving Instructors in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., a dive instructor for 15 years.
Diving appeals to a wide spectrum of people–baby boomers, the X-generation, the Y-generation, echo boomers–because there are so many different types that people can find one that fits their personality best, whether it’s recreational diving, night diving, shark diving, wreck diving, cave diving or deep water diving, McNeese said.
“Older divers can enjoy it for the tranquility and peacefulness. But it has enough edgy adventure to attract younger divers,” Valette said.
Most noticeable has been a significant upswing in the number of families learning to scuba.
“Families are looking for activities that bring them together. Diving is perfect. It’s a way to create lifelong memories that bond everyone,” said McNeese, a diver for more than 30 years.
It’s a sport that requires cooperation, not a competition pitting one person against another, McNeese added.
It probably doesn’t hurt that the best diving usually is done in alluring tropical destinations.
There are between 175,000 and 200,000 new divers certified each year by one of the four main dive training organizations–SSI; PADI; SDI (Scuba Diving International), and NAUI (National Association of Underwater Instructors)–according to an annual census by the Diving Equipment and Marketing Association, a nonprofit trade association in San Diego.
In my class, there were two bachelors, two mothers and their teenage daughters, and a dad and his 10-year-old son.
“More women and more families for sure,” said 36-year-old Michael Druce, who has made more than 1,000 dives since taking up the sport at age 18. Druce’s shop, National Aquatics, hosted the class.
Over the seven-week course, I felt like a Renaissance man, learning about how my body uses oxygen and vents off nitrogen; the effects of increasing pressure on my body and my equipment; how to identify and treat diving-related illnesses and injuries; studying currents, tides and waves. I now can calculate my surface air consumption rate and use Navy dive tables to compute my residual nitrogen level.
Half of each three-hour class was spent in the pool–where I earned the nickname “Hoover” for vacuuming down a 3,000-psi tank of air in about 20 minutes on my first foray. (An experienced diver could make it last an hour, my instructor said.)
Learning to breathe under water is the chief skill to master. Easier said than done for some people. As I eventually learned, it’s a matter of relaxing and taking slow, deep, regular breaths. One of diving’s mantras–never hold your breath.
In the pool, we practiced troubleshooting skills: clearing our mask of water; retrieving our free-floating regulators; sharing air with a buddy whose tank has run out; manually inflating our buoyancy control vests, and ditching our weights.
The first step to becoming a scuba diver is to determine how serious your interest is. It is a sport with front-loaded expenses that easily can run to several thousand dollars for the serious diver by the time instruction, outfitting and travel expenses are tallied.
Instruction can range from the comprehensive classes offered by SSI and PADI that result in certification, to “resort” dives, which are usually one-day or weekend crash courses that include a supervised dive with a dive master.
“The best way to introduce someone to diving is to show them how easy it is, let them do it for themself,” said “Big Wave” Dave Reidenbach, who runs ScubaTour, a traveling interactive scuba experience sponsored by DEMA.
Over seven years, Reidenbach has given about 115,000 people a firsthand taste of scuba diving in a portable 4-foot-deep, 25,000-gallon pool that he has taken around the country to large fairs and festivals.
The brief demonstration–just like resort diving lessons–is not a substitute for real instruction, Reidenbach emphasized.
I spent the night before my open water dives tossing and turning. Excited, anxious.
I didn’t get much sleep, but I was calm and composed by the time I arrived at Sevey’s Marina on Skaneateles Lake, one of the easternmost Finger Lakes, about 30 miles south of Syracuse.
This time, as I slipped below the surface, I was quite relaxed. My breathing was regular. Suddenly, those weeks of practice in the pool paid off.
Floating weightless in the water is nearly indescribable. Shafts of sunlight mix in the water. Everything shimmers. If you could wake up inside a dream, this is what it would be like.
The fish didn’t seem to mind the intrusion. They barely noticed. I would not get excited about seeing one of these trout or bass in an aquarium exhibit.
But here, 30 feet down, floating with them in their native habitat, I’m transfixed, and I’m already hooked on scuba diving.
——
On the Net:
National Aquatic Service:
Scuba Schools International:
Professional Association of Diving Instructors:
Scuba Diving International:
National Association of Underwater Instructors:
Diving Equipment and Marketing Association:
