Category: Scuba Q&A

This is a continuation of a previous post which you can access HERE!

>Are the scuba / wet suits comfortable?

Not really, to be honest! A wetsuit should be snug and slightly uncomfortable, but not actually uncomfortable. It’s important to have a close fit because of the way wetsuits work:

A wetsuit is aptly named, because you get wet wearing it. Neoprene, what wetsuits are made of, is a decent insulating material. When you wear a wetsuit a layer of water gets trapped between your skin and the neoprene. your body heat warms up the water which in turn helps keep you warm. You don’t want that heated water to get out, so you want the wetsuit to be a bit tight.

Neoprene compresses under the pressure of the water as you go deeper and deeper, so an effective wetsuit is going to be a bit tighter than you might like. It should NOT be super uncomfortable, but as you start diving and the neoprene compresses it’ll become a lot more comfortable. It should under no circumstances be painful to wear, but if a wetsuit is too small you won’t be able to get it on anyway.

>Can plus sized folk learn to dive?

Yes they can, and I’ve gone diving with a lot of plus-sized people! Some of the most confident divers I’ve been around have been large men and women. I’m a skinny girl myself and I actually consider it a bit of a detriment for this particular sport…!

Diving can be enjoyed by anybody. This isn’t the exact answer to this question, but it gives me the opportunity to talk about disabilities and scuba.

I have a back issue, and despite not being able to do a lot of physical activities on land, I am fully able to dive. I need help when I need to have anything on my back like a heavy tank and weights, but when I’m underwater all the weight and pressure I would normally experience from lifting/carrying on land is gone. Others with more drastic health conditions and injuries– an amputee, for example– also have great success diving. There are lots of programs out there specifically designed to teach physically disabled individuals how to dive. Being able to move around freely in the water, when you can’t on land, is absolutely amazing.

And so on that note, different people with different body types can absolutely go diving. In my experience, people who have more body fat will stay warmer than someone with less. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but that’s a huge deal. Water sucks away body heat about 20 times faster than air does, so when you’re a skinny-minnie like me, you practically freeze in relatively warm water. I personally think being cold on a dive is one of life’s worst tortures…

People with more body mass/fat can and do maneuver underwater just as well as smaller people. When you dive, you don’t swim like you would on the surface of the water. It’s a pretty slow, relaxed activity. You don’t have to be Michael Phelps– you just have to know how to stay horizontal and kick your fins smoothly. Anyone can do that with a little instruction and practice.

If a girl with a bad back and no body fat can dive, anyone can haha! The one thing I can think of that may make things difficult is equipment sizing. A dive shop might not carry a wetsuit that’s big enough, but as time goes on more and more accommodations are made to be available for as many different people as possible. If you’re a plus-sized person and you want to dive regularly, consider investing in your own wetsuit, boots, and fins. BCDs are very adjustable so that’s rarely been a problem in my experience.

>…How do you breathe??? Is it like regular breathing on land? Is it like snorkeling where you have to be really careful not to get water in your breathing equipment? Is it a secret third thing involving an ancient ritual or something??

IT IS A SECRET ANCIENT RITUAL! Haha just kidding!

Or am I…?

This is a question I get a lot. When you diver, you have a tank of air strapped to your back. The air from the tank flows through a hose, and at the end of the hose is a mouthpiece called a regulator. The air in the tank has a lot of distance to cover before it gets to your mouth, so when you take a breath from the regulator there’s a little bit of resistance. Some people get nervous that there’s any resistance, but I’ve found that once those people get underwater they get so distracted by everything happening they forget about their fears.

You really just breathe normally from the regulator. The regulator is designed to fail open, which means that if there’s any problem, the regulator opens and keeps supplying air rather than closing and restricting the air flow.

Now, if that does happen– a free flow occurs– then the air comes out of the regulator really quickly! It’s too fast to keep in your mouth. You should have enough air in your tank to get safely to the surface, and there’s a way to tip your head against the regulator to sip the air when its free flowing.

>I’ve recently heard about dives being done at shipwrecks in the Canadian Arctic (the wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in Nunavut), and I was wondering how divers would deal with such cold water temperatures. (Presumably they’re doing it in the summer to avoid the ice, but still, I wonder how they aren’t suffering from hypothermia.)

Alright, first off, those are some hardcore ship names. Although I feel like naming a ship Terror and Erebus is downright bad luck…

This article answers this question, but let’s break it down into layman’s terms.

In one of the questions above I explained how a wetsuit works. There’s another type of suit called a drysuit. It’s also aptly named: you stay dry wearing it. Unlike a wetsuit, no water enters. Your body is completely sealed away and protected from touching the water. There are seals on the neck, wrists, and ankles (some suits like mine incorporate waterproof socks), so only your head, hands, and sometimes feet are exposed to the elements. This keeps you much warmer than a wetsuit. Air as an insulator is much more effective than water. Plus, you can wear layers in the drysuit because they won’t get wet!

In the case of the HHMS Erebus and Terror, the water is so cold divers use specially-made drysuits. These drysuits have attachment hoses that pump warm water through the suit, keeping the divers warm. That sounds like absolute luxury to me! As one diver says in the article, however, the first few minutes are miserable. Even with gloves, boots, insulation, and warm water… that ocean is not fun to be in. Sounds like it doesn’t matter what time of the year it is.

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:

1. Swim 200 meters/yards with mask, fins, and snorkel without stopping. No time limit.
2. 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 useing 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 contributed to suffering. Death is a natural part of the ecosystem and animals hunt and eat other animals, but I don’t think most animals are getting beaten up by a diver’s fin.

Good questions, all!