I told my friends online, “ask me scuba questions!” and they sent me some really good ones. This is a long one, folks!
>What’s your least favorite part of prepping for a dive?
I always feel like I’m forgetting a piece of equipment. At this point, I have almost all my own gear which makes it really easy to set everything up the evening before the dive. Despite that, I still always get this nagging worry in the back of my mind every morning as I’m driving to a shop, that I’ve left something important behind. I’ve got a pretty good track record now, so I don’t know why I worry!
Honestly though, my least part of prepping is setting up the dive with the dive shop. It’s the human interaction, getting information, making plans, changing plans, asking for information and not getting it… overall it’s been fine, but people can get really weird really fast. I just want to dive, man! I don’t want any drama!
>Did you have assumptions about scuba diving that changed since you began diving yourself?
As a kid I assumed diving was only for professionals. I didn’t understand that the vast majority of people who dive are doing it recreationally! Scuba was reserved for conservationists, military, filmmakers, etc. When my dad asked if I wanted to learn to dive, I didn’t know what in the world to expect.
>I know scuba divers try to maintain neutral buoyancy, but how do you know whether or not you’re at neutral buoyancy?
First let’s define the terms:
Buoyancy: The force a liquid puts on an object in the liquid, that pushes the object up. If an object is less dense than the liquid, it will float. If the object is more dense than the liquid, it will sink. If the object has the same density as the liquid, it will neither float nor sink. Buoyancy is the tendency of an object to float or rise when in a fluid.
Buoyancy is dependent on how dense an object is, and how much water it displaces.
Positive Buoyancy: You are floating. If you’re on the surface of the water, you are staying there. If you’re underwater, you’re moving up towards the surface. You are less dense than the water.
Neutral Buoyancy: You are neither floating nor sinking. If you’re underwater, you are staying still. You are not going up or down. You are at the same density as the water.
Negative Buoyancy: You are sinking. If you’re on the surface of the water, you are going under. If you’re underwater, you’re moving down towards the bottom. You are denser than the water.
The obvious thing to first check when diving is to see if you’re floating up or sinking down. If you’re moving up, you might have air in your BCD (the flotation vest). Air makes you less buoyant. If you’re sinking, you probably don’t have enough air in your BCD. By adding and removing a little bit of air at a time from your BCD you can get to neutral buoyancy.
Many divers have a dive watch or a dive computer with a depth gauge built in, or an independent depth gauge. As you scuba and adjust your buoyancy using the BDC (adding or subtracting air), keep an eye on the depth gauge to see if you’re still floating or sinking. When you’re underwater sometimes you don’t have a reference point to see if you’re moving up/down in the water column– if you’re diving in the open ocean with no bottom in sight, you might not realize how much you’re moving around! Having a depth gauge is critical.
Being neutral while diving has a lot of advantages. You can control your position in the water better, which helps you get close to things like coral reefs or rocks. Then you can get a better look at the interesting little creatures hiding there! Being neutrally buoyant helps your trim– your position when you’re horizontal– and that helps you swim forward better in the water. That in turn makes you work less hard, which keeps your breathing slow and steady. You use less air! This is all why learning how to get to neutral buoyancy while diving is so important. It improves your overall diving and experience.
>How did you learn to swim? 🙂
I was enrolled in swimming lessons at a young age. In a way, it was a safety requirement: I grew up near the ocean, so swimming was a particularly important skill to have. Knowing even just how to tread water as a kid could help save me in case anything happened. It was also a nice thing to know how to do when on holiday! Hotel swimming pools are the best growing up. Now as an adult I’m constantly thinking, “Who’s peed in this pool…? Am I gonna pick up warts?!”
As an adult you can also sign up for swimming lessons at your local pool, and I highly recommend it. I worked as a lifeguard for a summer in college and I saw plenty of adults learning to swim. It’s kind of a scary undertaking so I’m quite proud when I see people giving it their best try!
In order to become certified as a diver, you do need to know how to swim. You don’t have to be a good swimmer, but there are a couple swim tests you have to pass. Here are the requirements for the PADI Open Water Diver course:
- Swim 200 meters/yards with mask, fins, and snorkel without stopping. No time limit.
- Float and tread water for 10 minutes using any method. You cannot touch the bottom or sides of the pool.
Once you’ve become a certified diver, you don’t have to perform another swim test unless you want to become a professional (Divemaster).
>What’s your favorite encounter with an animal during a dive? I’d love to hear your stories!
The latest crazy animal encounter involved a lionfish. As a warning, the following story does involve spearfishing and an animal being hunted, so if you don’t like that kind of content skip down to the next questions.
Lionfish are invasive where I live, and divers sometimes hunt them. My instructor at this time had brought his speargun with him on a training dive, and I was keeping an eye out for the fish. We ended up finding one, and the instructor speared it. I had never seen someone use a speargun in real life before and I have to admit it was fascinating, if morbid.
Lionfish are surprisingly hardy. The fish was a fighter, and even after when we thought it was dead, it renewed it’s efforts to escape! My instructor was trying to feed the lionfish to an eel we had found, and removed the lionfish from his spear to do so. The dang fish practically came back to life and started swimming towards me and the other diver next to me.
Lionfish, in addition to being invasive, are venomous! They have big, beautiful spines on their backs that can deliver a nasty venom to anything that dares try to eat it. Or… to a couple divers it’s angry at. I didn’t want to get stung by a lionfish, and I certainly couldn’t let my dive buddy get stung, so I stopped it using the only safe thing immediately available to me in the moment:
I stomped it with my fin. Whack whack whack!!!! I tried kicking it away a few times, then pinned it under my fin when it wouldn’t give up. My instructor came over and speared it again, then waved it in the eel’s face one more time. The eel finally chomped down on the lionfish, and the problem was taken care of.
I still feel bad about smacking the lionfish. Yes, they’re bad for reefs because they eat native fish and outcompete everything in the area, leading to loss of biodiversity, but I don’t think most animals are getting beaten up by a diver’s fin.
Good questions, all!
