How to Prepare for Your First SCUBA Dive
You’ve got your Scuba certification, you’ve got your Scuba gear, and now you’re itching to go on your first Scuba dive. And sure, the certification process reviewed all the basics, but there are still other practicalities that an informed diver should know. This article will outline the methods and precautions observed by safe divers around the world. Attraction - There are many sights under the water including coral reefs, shipwrecks, caves, and any assortment of plants and animals. Coral reefs...
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3 Factors Ruining Your Scuba Education
I’ve seen a lot of good students with bad instructors and I’ve seen a lot of good instructors with bad students. This has as much to do with the mindsets and motivations of the individuals involved as it has to do with their actual abilities. I find the following three major factors work against both students and instructors in the dive industry: 1. Certification vs Education When you show up for any level of scuba training, whether it is an open water certification or a technical diving course,...
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Scuba Diving Is A Wonderful Sport: Just Eliminate The Risks
Adventure channels and tourism channels show glorious breathtaking visuals of blue skies and crystal clear water and people scuba diving among the fishes. The question that arises is whether we are safe, amongst a vast variety of underwater life, some of which can be extremely dangerous and in territory that is alien to humans, we are not born to swim and we cannot breathe underwater, can we? The simple answer is yes and no. It is similar to mountaineering. When Edmund Hillary was asked whether ...
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Can I Dive With.......
Reprinted from Scuba Diving::::: Dive doctors and operators have long lowered their own risk by limiting yours when certain medical conditions enter the picture. Asthma? Sorry, no dice … or dives. Ditto for diabetes, heart disease and other conditions that increase the odds of something going wrong down below. But the tide is slowly turning. For more than two decades, the Divers Alert Network has compiled information on divers from around the globe, many who continued diving despite disqualifyin...
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Ask an Expert: Should Divers Reveal Their Medications?
Is the average dive professional really qualified to safeguard — never mind interpret — your personal medical history? By Larry Lozuk Several years ago while managing an IT project at a large health-care provider, I witnessed my team lead being a perfect gentleman. As we returned from lunch, he held the door open for a woman who happened to be walking into the building just as we were. She introduced herself as the facility’s compliance director for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountab...
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Volunteering in film re-enacting fatal shark attack a solemn memory of Shark Week for BadDiverBill
BadDiversTV is behind Bill Hill now but his love for scuba remains and two new passions music and promoting causes have been added. When a funding deal fell through for BadDiverBill’s Quest, which was to find the most interesting DIVE sites, Dive buddies and DIVE bars, Hill’s pseudonym of BadDiverBill was set aside, along with his trademark "adult beverages," hat and sunglasses. They’re gone, but not forgotten. If the opportunity arose, says Bill, "BadDiverBill would don his hat and sunglasses a...
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Too Old To Learn Scuba Diving?
Reprinted from Enzine Articles We are always told we should learn sports when we are young, when our bodies are more resilient to the bruises and bumps which can be afflicted on us when we learn a new sport. This is true to a certain extent. Take for example, my experience learning wind surfing. I learnt the sport when I was 26. If I were to learn this sport now at age 42, chances are I would not go far and would probably give up after 1 or 2 tries. Learning wind surfing was like battling with a...
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Mixing sun, sand, sailing, scuba helps travel agent serve divers
As a travel agent and a diver with about 10,000 dives under his belt, Bryan Cunningham knows the scuba travel business well. But he also knows it is an industry that is changing all the time. Dive shops change. The condition of their dive boats can change. So do dive sites. That’s why Bryan will leave his desk at Travelpath in Burlington, Ontario and relocate to the Caribbean. "I already know quite a few probably 40 different dive operators in the Caribbean," he says. "But things change all the ...
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Descent Checks - Vital on Every Dive
Periodic checks with your dive buddies while diving is always a good thing. Things can start to develop in a negative way, and fast. Just because you met your dive buddies on the hang line from the boat, or the edge of the cliff before descending into the abyss, does not mean something did not change. Things can happen at a moments notice. Descent checks are vital to the success and enjoyment of every dive. Every now and then I’m on a road trip with my family where we are caravanning with other ...
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Hydration and Dive Safety
While you were taking your open water or other course(s), I’m sure the importance of hydration while diving was mentioned. But how much was it stressed? Everyone knows that being dehydrated is bad in general, but was the significance of hydration during scuba diving explained to you? Do you know why it’s important to scuba diving specifically? Do you know how scuba diving itself dehydrates you faster than many other activities? Do you know the symptoms and what to do about it? If you do, great! ...
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Diving in Rough Seas – When and how to dive in bad weather
SOMETIMES DURING A DIVE, CONDITIONS ARE JUST PERFECT. SUN IS WARM, SKY IS CLEAR, SEA IS CALM. OTHER TIMES, NOT SO MUCH. THEN WHAT? First, just to make sure there are no misunderstandings: diving should be both fun and safe. If you’re ever in doubt as to whether a dive will be either, due to rough conditions, always err on the side of conservatism and cancel the dive. Never dive in a situation where you feel you’re outside of your dive skill range. That being said, as you increase dive experience...
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Dispelling the Myths Surrounding Why You Shouldn’t Scuba Dive
Reprinted from Enzine Articles c/o Mike S Shea I have been a scuba diver for almost 20 years and a scuba instructor for more than 5 years. Still, it shocks me to hear some of the myths on why people don’t want to dive. Some of the most common myths include: scuba diving is too hard; there is nowhere around here to go diving; scuba equipment costs too much; or my favorite is that scuba diving is too extreme or dangerous. Let’s start with the last one, scuba diving is too extreme for the common pe...
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Frilled Shark
The frilled shark (Chlamydoselachus anguineus) is one of two extant species of shark in the family Chlamydoselachidae, with a wide but patchy distribution in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This rare species is found over the outer continental shelf and upper continental slope, generally near the bottom, though there is evidence of substantial upward movements. It has been caught as deep as 1,570 m (5,150 ft). In Suruga Bay, Japan it is most common at depths of 50–200 m (160–660 ft). Exhibiting...
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Diver checks off item on ’bucket list’ with Bonaire dive
One item on my "bucket list" was to dive in Bonaire mission accomplished. Along with Aruba and Curacao, Bonaire is one of the ABC Islands that are the western-most islands of the Leeward Antilles in the Caribbean, north of Venezuela. Bonaire’s licence plates proudly declare that it is a "Diver’s Paradise" and after experiencing the underwater beauty off its coast, I can vouch for that claim. There are more than 60 dive locations along Bonaire’s shoreline. We dove the West Coast, which is calmer ...
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Tips For Beginner Scuba Divers: How To Control Panic or Anxiety Attacks Underwater
Although under water anxiety attacks are common events in scuba diving, most beginner scuba divers may not know how common they are until they start taking their training classes. So, instructors who want to keep their classes safe from harm usually advise their students of the frequency and how to handle them if they occur while they are under water. Divers who have had these experiences may describe the attacks as a sudden panicky feeling when they realize that they are under the water and a g...
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4 Beginner Tips for Good Scuba Diving Etiquette
No matter what type of hobby you may have and what extracurricular activities you participate in on your free time, every activity has a certain set of rules that must be followed in order to maintain good relations with those you are participating with during the activity. In that regard, scuba diving is no different. There are certain rules for practicing good etiquette as a scuba diver that you need to know before you get into the boat and strap on your oxygen tank. These unspoken rules of be...
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Key Largo dive spawned young girl’s passion for scuba
It was during a cruise on the family boat from Hamilton, Ontario, to the Bahamas that Tess Miller came to appreciate her parents’ passion for scuba diving. Just eight years old at the time, Tess, from London, Ontario, had taken some scuba lessons before the journey began. But she first experienced the beauty and serenity of diving in Key Largo. They were waiting there to rendezvous with two other families who also had their own boats, before going on together to their Bahamas destination. “We do...
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Cookie Cutter Sharks
Thanks to e-How The cookie cutter shark is a relatively small deepwater shark known for its rather unusual feeding habits and the round wounds it leaves on its prey items. There is still relatively little known about this elusive species, but better deep sea exploration and improved dissection techniques in recovered specimens have helped shed light on it. While the species is not considered threatened, they are difficult to find and observe due to their deep water habitat. Appearance The cookie...
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How to Determine the Diopter for a Scuba Mask
Thanks to e-how and Pamela Stephens Obtain a current eye glass prescription. Using an out-of-date prescription can result in an inaccurate diopter choice for your scuba mask lenses. Refer to the eye glass prescription. Decoding the prescription is not as difficult as it might first appear. "Oculus dexter" (OD), "oculus sinister" (OS) and "oculus utrique" (OU) are Latin terms that mean right eye, left eye and both eyes. Sphere is the amount of correction needed in each eye. Cylinder is the amount...
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Build A Diving Helmet from a Water Heater (Jan, 1932)
A Diving Helmet from a Water Heater THEY go down to the sea in old water heaters along the Atlantic coast these days, now that some young man with a leaning toward aquatic sports has proved how easy it is to make an excellent diving helmet from a metal water heater which will enable its wearer to walk comfortably on the sea floor 35 feet and more below the surface. A few feet of garden hose, two pairs of bellows, a couple of valve boxes and a cylindrical metal boiler of the type used in most hom...
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