Have you entered the contest yet? If not, email me your submissions! I thought it only fair to tell you about one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen while diving. Here goes:

Sea Lion Cove

It had been a long day. After two dives near Los Coronados islands, off the coast of California, we were having boat trouble. Meanwhile, the passengers were getting restless and ready to just call it quits, forgetting our third dive. (more…)

This is a little contradictory to my last post, but nevertheless, sometimes we want to buy gifts for the divers in our lives.

Back in February I posted a list of Valentine’s Day gifts for scuba divers. There’s nothing holiday-specific to that list, so check it out if you’re looking for quick ideas.

Certification is always a great gift, but if you’re looking for something a little less committal for a non-diver, consider gifting a Discover Scuba Diving session. Most shops will set you up with one, and it allows your loved one to try out scuba diving in a very controlled setting to get a feel for things with minimal training. I think it definitely qualifies as an Experience, rather than Stuff.

I’ve been seeing more articles discussing a shift in the public’s thinking this year. A shift of spending money on experiences, not stuff. I whole-heartedly agree, and as a scuba diver, I imagine you do as well.

We should take a step back this holiday season and take a look at what we value. Ask yourself a few questions:

What did you get for Christmas five years ago? Two years ago? Last year?

You probably don’t even remember. How about this one:

Where did you go on vacation five years ago? Two years ago? Last year?

Even if it takes a moment to recall, I imagine these memories are much more vivid in your mind. I’m not saying you have to go on an expensive vacation, but this holiday season, focus more on experiences, rather than stuff. The holidays are usually about tradition, but try doing some different. Go on a mini-adventure. Go somewhere you usually don’t go. Cook something you never cook. Instead of worrying about buying presents, think about simply being present and enjoying the here and now.

When thinking about gifts, think about maximizing their experiences, rather than stuffing their closest. Many already know what a great gift scuba certification is for this very reason. It’s like giving someone a passport to a whole other dimension.

Lastly, I leave you with this recent article from Zen Habits: The Case Against Buying Christmas Presents. Leo makes compelling arguments, that even if you don’t completely agree, should give us something to think about this time of year.

Articles often refer to scuba as a “recreational sport”. PADI’s magazine is called Sport Diver. People often question whether cheerleading is a sport¹, but what about scuba diving?

Also, like cheerleading, I believe I know where the confusion stems from. And if I learned anything from former U.S. president Bill Clinton, it’s that when answering a question, it’s important to define all terms involved. So how do we define “sport”? Straight from my computer’s dictionary:

An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.

Well, it’s pretty clear from that, isn’t it? Unless you’re having search and rescue competitions, diving is not a sport. Does that mean all the articles and PADI are wrong? Not necessarily. Sport, like many words, has many definitions:

dated: entertainment, fun.

And yet one more

archaic: a source of amusement or entertainment.

So while you can’t consider diving a sport by the standard definition, it can be by another, albeit dated, definition. This basically makes it a personal call. Is it ok to call it a sport using the old world terminology, or would you rather stick with modern definitions?

I believe the answer most people take, especially in journalism, is dependent on the context, i.e., if they can’t come up with a synonym that works as well as sport, then they call it a sport. You’re free to do the same, but don’t be surprised if sticklers like me call you out on it.

1. It isn’t.

I am not a lawyer, and this is not official legal advice. In addition, laws vary between countries, so the situation can always be different for your country or the country you’re diving in.

A while back, I attempted to answer this question about getting sued for not helping divers. Mainly this applies to professionals, who are trained to assist divers in distress.

The question was prompted by dive professionals (divemasters, instructors, etc.) who go on vacation, and when asked in a dive shop flash their advanced open water certification cards—not letting the shop know they have more training. The thinking is that when I am on vacation I don’t want to worry about other divers, and especially don’t want to get sued for not helping.

I asked around, and apparently there is no precedent for this. Unless you’re an employee of the dive operation, simply being there does not place a burden of responsibility on you.

Reader Steven pointed out an exception in some countries, like in the U.K. If you are a diver’s buddy, and they get into trouble, a “duty of care” kicks in and you are responsible to assist them to the limits of your training.

Even if you don’t reveal your true certification level, if an accident occurs with your dive buddy, the shop (or the family’s legal council) will look into it and discover whether you acted to the limits of your training.

As an open water or even an advanced open water diver, simply saying “the situation was too dangerous so I went for help” is a valid excuse, since your limits of training are not very high. However, as a rescue diver, divemaster, or instructor, you are explicitly trained for these situations, so you better be prepared to help.

Again, this only applies in certain countries, so check on your diving region. And it only applies to your buddy—you are not responsible for everyone in the water.

Thanks again to Steven for the additional information.

Photo by Let Ideas Compete

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?

To leave a comment, go to the bottom of the post page. If you are on the homepage, click on the title of this post to go to the post page.

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.