Posted by jlyle on April 26, 2003 at 08:03:03:
In Reply to: Re: Why I started diving僕ate as it is . .I understand ! posted by dawhale on April 26, 2003 at 06:22:58:
As a child, I spent the summers at the bottom of swimming pools holding my breath as long as I could. After getting married and moving to California we met a couple with a big sailboat and spent every other weekend and vacations sailing to the Channel Islands, fishing, swimming and enjoying ourselves greatly. I never once thought about scuba diving! Yes, I had seen all of the Jacque Cousteau specials and the Sea Hunt shows, but it never dawned on me that I, too, could explore the ocean underwater. After many, many years, my then ten year old son Tom subscribed to Skin Diver magazine and announced that he wanted to be a scuba diver. He called all of the local dive shops to find out how to go about it and learned that he had to be twelve years old before he could take OW. For Christmas I bought a copy of the NASDS open water manual and gave it to him. He read it from cover to cover, twice and worked all of the problems, teaching himself the navy tables. As his 12th birthday approached, I asked him about his desire to get certified and he said he didn't want to do it alone. Well, Deborah volunteered to go along with him and I agreed to pay for their classes. A couple of days later I realized I was making a great mistake and announced that I was going to go along with them. When the dive instructor asked Deborah and me why we wanted to do scuba, we both looked at each other and said, "Tom." ...not what he wanted to hear.
We bought our booties, gloves, masks and snorkles. Deborah suggested that we go down to the beach and try them out before the class. We snorkled up and down the beach at Hermosa and would you believe we saw some small fish in the surf! Wonderful.
Our classes were scheduled in the fall; we did our first OW dive at Veteran's Park, Redondo Beach. Boy, were we all stoked. I vaguely remember seeing a sea pen, a couple of starfish and lots of sand. Fantastic; this is for us! Upon returning to the local dive shop I plunked down the credit card and paid for three full sets of gear.
Since then, I've logged over 1,500 dives (Deborah has over 1,100). We've seen three more of the children certified. We've gone through Dive Master certification and traveled the world in search of new adventures. We dive locally whenever we can, catch lobsters, take pictures, and just get wet. We should have gotten certified when we were younger. Now we have to dive, dive, dive to catch up.
I still dream of that sea pen...
DSAO