I think for anything important in your life it’s crucial to have goals. Goals make sure you have thought things through and know exactly what you want to get out of life.

Sometime last year, scuba became more than a hobby to me. As such, I’ve been defining goals that describe what I want to get out of this experience. This blog is one such goal, a way for me to share what I learn with others on the internet, and as the sub-title says, a place for divers to spend their time above the water.

One other goal of mine is to become a certified scuba instructor. If you’ve followed the blog for long, you’d know that after finishing my Divemaster certification earlier this year, I am well on my way.

I’m currently on track to become a full-fledged PADI instructor sometime in spring of next year. Why the delay? Time and money, mostly. I have begun my Assistant Instructor certification, although that will allow me to do little more than what I can do with a Divemaster certification.

Why would one want to become an instructor?

• Career. Certainly a possibility to teach scuba for a living. The pay isn’t great, but you get to dive regularly and share your passion with others. This one does not describe me, though.
• Friends & family. As an instructor, you are free to certify your friends and family. Want to go on a scuba trip but don’t have any certified buddy’s to go with? Make your own buddy. As I mentioned, instructor certification is expensive and time-consuming, so this reason alone probably isn’t sufficient, but is more of a perk.
• Knowledge. Going the pro path teaches you more about diving than you thought you’d ever know. You still don’t know everything, but as an instructor you will have fairly in-depth knowledge of most things scuba. I definitely enjoy this part of things, especially learning teaching theory and how people learn.
• That type of person. Some people are just that way. When you get into something, you want to go all the way. Whether you call them Type A or something else, being like this is a strong motivator.
• Comfort. The level of experience you quickly achieve moving through the professional ranks comes along with a level of comfort in the water. This level comes much quicker than just through regular diving. The dissemination of dive skills lets you master each one, increasing your overall comfort in the water. As with certifying your buddies, this one probably isn’t a prime reason to become an instructor, but rather is a side bonus.

These are just a few reasons to become an instructor. I’ll keep you up-to-date on my progress and anything of interest that happens all the way. In the future, I’ll also write about some other scuba goals that I have or am in the process of making.

What do you think about instructor certification? Is it for you? If you already are an instructor, what made you want to do it?

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Photo by Martin Burns

The Toronto Sun recently reported that actor Ving Rhames (Mission: Impossible, Pulp Fiction) has done some underwater work for a recent film, Piranha 3D. During one trip the actor spotted a “prehistoric” looking creature that he couldn’t identify.¹ This freaked him out so much that he “hasn’t done any scuba diving since.”

That’s a little bit silly, but he relates some truth:

I really feel that there are things in the ocean that we have no idea about. I think there’s so much we don’t know and the unknown in the ocean; every 10 years or so we find some fossil that’s been there before mankind.

I find it funny that we can have the same exactly feelings about something, yet reach opposite conclusions. What keeps him out of the water is what draws me to it. If you’ve gleaned anything from The Diving Blog’s fish identification series, it’s that I enjoy learning new species of sea critters, as I imagine many divers do.

Mr. Rhames has my sympathy. He is disturbed significantly by one of the very reasons why I dive.

Is the draw of the unknown one of the reasons you keep getting in the water? Let us know in the comments.

1 – From his description, “a combination of a catfish and something with a large oblongish-type head”, what do you think he saw? Maybe a humphead wrasse?

A few weeks ago I posed the question, “How many certified divers are there?” As we saw, the question is tricky and there really is no straightforward answer. I did my best and used some questionable extrapolation to get a very rough number, but the error in such a measure is extremely high.

This week we’re going to ask a similar question: “How many active divers are there?” Not only is this question interesting for its own sake, but it’s also also important for many scuba businesses to know the size of their customer base. It also gives us an idea of how many inactive divers are out there, leading to questions about their inactivity. I certainly care, since active divers are my target audience, as well as inactive divers thinking about getting back into it.

Defining active

Before this question can even remotely be addressed, we need some notion of what it means to be an active diver. Like many things in life, there is no definitive answer. Diving Equipment and Marketing Association (DEMA) says that “active” is more a continuous scale than a binary, black and white identifier, and I agree. For this reason, they list 9 factors which contribute to activity levels:

1. Number of additional certifications after initial certification.
2. Number of overnight dive trips in the past 12 months.
3. Number of days spent on most recent dive trip.
4. Number of dive trips (no overnight stay) made in the past 12 months.
5. Number of lifetime international dive trips.
6. Number of scuba dives made in the past 2 years.
7. Number of visits to local dive store in the past 12 months.
8. Amount spent on scuba equipment in lifetime.
9. Amount spent on scuba equipment in the past 12 months.

The last items start to hone in on the purpose of DEMA identifying active divers, namely people who will spend money on scuba.

Lifestyle clusters

On their 2006 profile of active divers, DEMA organizes divers into what they call “lifestyle clusters” based on the preceding nine criteria plus median income. The majority of these divers are males between the ages of 38 and 53 (mean age: 45; median: 46) who make around 75,000 – 100,000 USD a year. Needless to say, most are also white collar workers.

The lifestyle clustering is useful for marketers who need to target customers, but not very useful for getting an accurate picture of how many active divers are out there. Nevertheless, DEMA gives the top 5 lifestyle clusters and claims that about 10% of the US population fits into one of those categories. This gives about 30 million active divers in the US. However, they fail to give which of the 9 criteria these clusters meet, and by how much. This is especially important considering this number looks a little high.

Guesstimates

Not surprisingly, most numbers we come up with are going to be guesses, hopefully educated but sometimes not. Undercurrent has an article from 2007 about active divers, giving a history of these guesstimates.

An oft-cited figure is that there were 3.5 million active divers in the late 80’s. As the article points out, however, this figure was an uneducated guess, and likely as much as an order of magnitude too high, with one source claiming the number to be closer to 700,000. This was concurrent with large growth in certification numbers, so it doesn’t give a helpful modern picture.

Numbers from the National Sporting Goods Association start to seem more realistic. In an annual poll, they ask participants, “Did you participate in diving on one or more occasion?” Diving one or more times per year is a very loose definition of active, yet this poll puts the number at 2.1 million divers.

Data from resort destinations, not including certification courses, puts the number of US destination divers at around 1.5 million—so it seems we’re finally starting to hone in on a number.

Conclusion

The Undercurrent article concludes that 1.2 million, plus or minus 15% seems a reasonably accurate measure. From looking at the data, that seems about right to me as well. Note, however, that this is active divers in the US. While the States accounts for a majority of worldwide divers, there are still a lot of people out there unaccounted for.

At the end of the day, the number only matters based on what you need it for. Those who participate in only one dive a year may not be the market you are looking for, such as extremely active divers. At least be glad to know that there are a lot of us out there, and by encouraging activities like local dive clubs (and The Diving Blog!) the number only grows.

We’ve come a long way from the days where scuba was considered an elite activity, but there’s plenty room for more. The ocean’s a big place.

A year ago I was working in New Zealand. I was interested in what the local diving had to offer, so I signed up for a small trip off the local coast of Wellington. What happened on that trip turned out to be a valuable learning experience.

It was a cold morning when we pushed off from shore in a small fishing boat, six divers and two crew. I was a little nervous since I knew the water would be cold—it was winter there, after all. I wore an old, uncomfortable rented wetsuit. A farmer john that had seen more than his fair share of divers. Add in the unfamiliar equipment and all weights and cylinder measured in that odd system known as metric, and I was in an uncomfortable place to start a dive.

Once on the water the captain asked us each to introduce ourselves and briefly outline our experience. As we went around, I quickly realized I was the most unseasoned diver on the boat. Everyone else had hundreds, some thousands, of dives, most in the murky Wellington waters. Despite having recently completed my rescue diver certification, I was feeling a little intimidated when I had to announce my meager dive experience.

I was teamed up with Tom, one of the highly experienced divers, and a nice guy to boot. We did backrolls into the choppy water. With the new equipment and unfamiliar waters I was unsure of my weighting. When grabbing my weights in the shop, I had no idea how many to use. Not only were they in kilograms (although I knew the rough conversion), I had all new equipment and did not have a good starting point. I asked around what others were wearing, but I couldn’t use anyone remotely close to my size’s weights as a guide (for example, one diver had a steel plate in his BCD).

Time to descend. Instead of stopping Tom and doing a proper weight check, I didn’t want to look like an amateur and descended anyway. As soon as I slipped beneath the surface I knew I had made a mistake. Not a great way to start a dive.

Despite this ominous feeling, the dive went off without a hitch. I was cold and burning through air faster than Tom. I felt bad that I was limiting our dive time, but when my air got low, it was time to end the dive, but first, a safety stop at 5 meters.

During the safety stop I started to feel the effects of not being properly weighted. As my tank emptied, it became more buoyant, requiring more weight to stay underwater—weight that I didn’t have. Only a minute in and I was struggling to stay underwater. In fact, I was completely upside-down kicking to stay at safety stop depth. Unable to fight the buoyancy any more, I floated to the surface right before the end of the requisite three minutes, while my confused buddy watched from his safe depth.

In an attempt not to embarrass myself and look like an “amateur”, I ended up embarrassing myself far worse. Fortunately, my dive buddy was gracious and did not say anything as I found more weight for the next dive. I realized my stupid mistake and swore I would never put myself at risk again for the sake of looking more experienced. This time it wasn’t a big deal, but next time it may be in a more unforgiving environment.

No matter how little or how much you dive, there is nothing embarrassing about being safe and comfortable on all your dives. If your buddy or anyone else has a problem, then it is their problem, and you can rest assured that they’ll be the ones who end up looking inexperienced. No diver worth their salt would belittle you for being a safe and cautious scuba diver.

Photo by JennyHuang

Way back when, we gave a handful of tips for improving your air consumption. Today we have a few more.

• Be prepared. Have your equipment checked out and ready before you enter the water. Any problems will cost you in air. Also, know your dive site and bring appropriate equipment. If you know you won’t need the camera, for instance, leave it behind. It’ll improve your air consumption.
• Beware of free-flowing regulators. Some regulators tend to free-flow often. Be aware if you have one of these so you can catch it as soon as you enter the water. Free-flows drain air fast.
• Learn to kick properly. This is a topic for another article, but learning the proper kick technique will minimize wasted energy underwater.

Along with the previous list, choose one or two of these items to focus on each time you dive. You will be pleasantly surprised at how much air you’ll end dives with.

Photo by aa7ae

A Sydney newspaper reports that certain marine areas are overcrowded with scuba divers. These complaints come mainly from swimmers and anglers. The fishermen, in particular, are upset that divers scare off the catch of the day.

Sounds like its time for a sit-down to establish proper etiquette between the competing groups.

Visibility is one of the most subjective aspects of diving. Ask 10 people after a dive what they think the visibility was, and you’ll get 9 different answers. The last person will spend a half hour trying to guess.

Defining

People generally suck at estimating visibility (“viz”). Why is that? I think it comes down to a lack of common definition. I will attempt to define visibility in concrete terms.

The best place to start for this sort of thing is the dictionary. Webster’s defines visibility as

The distance at which something can be seen.

We’re getting closer, but what exactly is the “something” to be seen? I’ve heard a few options: the distance at which hand signals are no longer recognizable, the distance you can’t see a diver’s bubbles, and the distance at which you can’t distinguish an object. The first might be too strict for general use, but the last two start to get the point. Let’s define visibility as the distance at which an object cannot be discerned. The point at which you can’t tell for sure if that is a diver in the distance is the extent of the visibility.

Measuring

That was the easy part, now comes the hard part. How do we measure viz? Believe it or not, there is an established manner. It requires something called a Secchi disk. The disc is attached to a line and gradually moved from the measurer. The distance where the disk cannot be seen is recorded, with the length of the line being the visibility. Even more advanced methods with higher precision exist using photometers.

That’s nice for Jacques Cousteau, but not for Joe Diver who doesn’t have a Secchi disk on hand.

First of all, don’t feel bad. Viz is hard to guesstimate, but gets easier with experience. Even then, in general a range is a better indicator for estimating viz rather than a hard, fixed number. Try to get the lower end where things get blurry and the upper end where things can no longer be seen. As you get better with distances, this range will get smaller and the “true” viz will probably lie somewhere in between.

One rule with measuring viz for scuba: it measures horizontal distance. Vertical distance can be deceiving, as light from the surface increases visibility. However, it can be useful both for an upper bound on your range (vertical viz will always be higher than horizontal) and for estimating distances, since you always know your depth. Some, as a rule of thumb, define the viz as the vertical visibility (the depth where you can no longer see the surface) minus 3 m / 10 ft. Probably a good guideline, but useless in most of the tropics, where the viz always exceeds the dive depth.

Try to use anything you have to your advantage. Length of a wreck, for instance. You can find this out easily and use it to gauge distances more accurately.

Utilizing

I’ll let you in on a secret: it doesn’t really matter. Viz is cool for bragging (“We could easily see over 100 meters!”), but there aren’t too many practical reasons where an accurate number is necessary. There are exceptions, however. For instance, a photographer probably cares more so than others, since the equipment they take can depend on these numbers.

In general, ranges are fine, and even broad descriptions sufficing as well. A scale that goes something like amazing -> great -> good -> ok -> where’s my buddy? -> I can’t see my hand, is descriptive and covers most situations. Make an educated guess, compare to the guesses of others to refine your estimation abilities, but don’t get too hung up on the ever-elusive viz.

Need a gift for that special diver in your life? You may think diving-related gifts always break the bank, but here’s a list of mostly inexpensive ideas. Some of these can be extremely handy gadgets for a diver, even if she would never think to buy it for herself.

• Retractors, clips, etc. – These little guys can be immensely useful.
• Fancy dive log – Is your partner crazy about maintaining a meticulous log book? Maybe one of these is for him.
• Spring fin straps – These things are great for slipping open-heeled fins on and off easily.
• Mask cover – We’ve talked about how awesome these things are.
• Noisemakers – Get a pair of these, one for each of you. Check out your options at our article on noisemakers for scuba divers.
• Dive knife – Depending on where they dive, a knife could be useful. Nothing says I love you like weaponry.
• Dive bag – A very practical gift, since we all have to haul our luggage around somehow.
• Spare parts kit – Especially good for the tinkerer.
• Dive light – Not the cheapest gift, but good if your significant other enjoys night diving, and always has to rent a light.

What are your clever gift ideas for scuba divers?