Monday, 4 October 2004
08:43 PM
Over this last weekend, Zack and I started a scuba diving course. I work with some enthusiastic divers, and a few months ago one of them made such a persuasive pitch for scuba diving that I thought it might be fun to give it a try. I asked Zack if we wanted to as well. He's giving some thought to studying marine biology, plus he knows some people who are divers, so he was game. Sabrina, uh, no.
So we spent Friday evening and all day Saturday and Sunday doing the first part of the course. It was part class work, learning arcana like pressure differentials, hand signals, and the complexities of the Recreational Dive Table. We spent the rest of the time doing a practicum in the pool.
Nothing probably really prepares you for the experience of diving with scuba gear. Doing anything underwater, of course, is slow, and many actions have a delayed reaction. Breathing in, for example, causes you to rise, although not immediately; exhaling makes you descend, but again not immediately. Establishing neutral buoyancy -- that is, hovering in one place -- is clearly a skill that requires practice. And it probably helps if you have a semblance of balance, which I don't. Obviously you can't talk underwater -- an unusual experience for me and Zack -- but I was surprised at how much noise just the breathing made. You have quite limited vision (virtually no peripheral vision), and you're working in three dimensions. With the whole class swimming around in the pool, I was occasionally startled to find someone directly below or above me.
Scuba is surprisingly complex. There is a lot to learn intellectually, such as how to calculate how long you can stay at specific depths, and mastering quite a bit of equipment. The instructor noted that diving is about as close as we can get to being an astronaut, meaning the ability to float and move effortlessly in all directions. As with astronauts, there is a hell of a lot of gear you need to achieve this. People obviously get used to it, but I think even experienced divers probably find it kind of heavy and clunky until they get in the water, where it makes sense. When I first discussed scuba with my coworker, I said that it seemed to be expensive, like skiing. "Oh no," he said. "It's much more expensive than that." At one point during the weekend, the instructor gave us a tour of the store, showing us various pieces of equipment from budget through luxury. I think most of us were mentally totting up the costs of each component and wincing as we would get to each new piece.
Pool work consisted primarily of learning "skills," which is a fairly bland way to say that you're learning how to survive. Scuba diving takes place in an inhospitable environment, and it's a whole lot more than jumping into the water and breathing from a tank. As became clear to me over the course of our practicum, scuba diving has an alarmingly small margin of error. Among the things we learned are that there are many ways to sustain grave injury under the water. (Nice, gulp, summary here.) Among them are (as many people know) ascending rapidly from a great depth, to avoid the bends. Just for ordinary ascent and descent you better learn to "equalize," which means to pop your ears, else you can damage your eardrum and other delicate membranes.[1] Is your hood on too tight? You could pass out and drown, oops. Shallowy, panicked breathing? Ditto. To novices like me, it was also surprising to hear that you can kill yourself by holding your breath.
So one of the goals of the "skills" is to learn to overcome instinctual behaviors. Breathe only through your mouth. Don't ever breathe in through your nose. Never hold your breath. The book can say this, and the instructor can say it, but when we're under the water, we beginners have a great deal to think about, and it's awful easy to hold your breath (it's the natural thing to do under water, for god's sake) or to take a wee breath through your nose. I did the latter at one point by accident and suffered the inevitable consequence.
We also did exercises that mimicked various failure conditions. They taught us these skills by making us do unpleasant things, to the point where I was not always, you know, looking forward to the next skill. We learned to clear a flooded mask, for example, or remove it and replace it underwater. A little scarier is learning what to do if you run out of air or if your regulator fails and starts spewing air all over the place. For these skills, the goal is to learn an appropriate reaction. The appropriate reaction is what saves your life. In theory, knowing the appropriate reaction also helps you control panic. I just wonder how calmly I'd react to, say, a regulator failure while 60 feet underwater. Even in just 12 feet of a pool, with an instructor two feet away, I was never completely free of the clench of panic. Then again, that was true when I started driving, too.
Our instructor was fabulous. It turns out he's the husband of a woman I work with. I knew that he worked as an instructor, but we were fortunate to get him by luck of the draw. He was an excellent explainer, and underwater he communicated with great clarity. In fact, after one of our exercises he pointed out to me, to the amusement of the class, that just because he demonstrates something slowly doesn't mean I have to do it slowly. I can just imagine myself recovering a lost regulator using the slow, sweeping gestures he used to show us that skill. There were also two divemasters who were assisting. I was very grateful to the one who helped me recover from my little nose-breathing episode, who not only modeled dead calm throughout my rising panic, but then was nice enough to say that it was the kind of thing that many people do.
Next weekend we'll do the second part of the course, which will involve reviewing the skills we learned in the pool, only doing it in the frigid waters of Puget Sound. People tell me that diving in real open water, not just in a pool, is more interesting. I confess that I'm not looking forward to having to repeat all the skills while in cold water, but it's part of the course requirement. If we get through our various dives this weekend, then Zack and I will be certified for open water. At that point, finally, we can start thinking about having some fun. And, of course, buying lots of gear.
PS One side effect of this scuba stuff is that I had to get contacts, since you can't wear glasses and I'm blind as a bat without them. Getting contacts proved to be a painless (haha) experience. I had an appointment, got a lesson, so to speak, in how to put them in and take them out, and went home with a box of disposables. It's a far cry from the horrors that people used to have to go through in my youth, when hard lenses were the only option. And hey, having contacts is probably useful for other stuff, too.
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