when I was in Mexico I took a scuba trip with my brother and enjoyed it. When we got back my dad signed us up for certification lessons. I’m now a level 1 Open Water Diver with SSI. Anybody else scuba dive? And if so, how’d you get into it, when, how many dives?
I haven’t gone scuba diving since 1997. I need to do it again soon.
I have a PADI advanced open water diving cert.
I took a few weeks of scuba lessons (and received my PADI cert.) over the summer between 8th and 9th grade (so when I was 13-14). I’ve done about a dozen open-water dives, with around 90ft being the deepest. My father was an avid scuba diver (he moved to FL from MI to sail and scuba), as were many of his friends. My parents used to have a 53’ Trimaran (named Tri-Dive) which they would take out to the bahamas/caribbean for a few weeks at a time (“stopping only for beer and bread”, my dad used to say). I was only on Tri-Dive once before it was sold, but it was huge. I haven’t been on a dive in over a year now, and the news that one of my uncles is moving to Costa Rica is making me want to go out more than ever.
here is a picture of Tri-Dive (my dad is the one waving on the far right)
http://img456.imageshack.us/my.php?image=tridive7fe.jpg
wow, that’s a big boat.
I used to be a very serious diver many years ago. Did my training with the BSAC in the days when PADI hadn’t even been thought of. At the height of my career I was doing over 100 dives a year - mainly around the British coast, but I also dived the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean from time to time, as well as inland sites in the UK. I still have a small inflatable boat tucked away in the shed.
My best diving memories are of week-long trips on a charter boat, The Harry Slater, in the Sound of Mull and out to Coll and Tiree. My last serious diving expedition was solo to the west coast of Scotland, diving mainly the sheltered sea lochs, and also on the coast around Oban.
Work and domestic circumstaces moved on, and now my out-dated unserviced kit languishes in a shed somewhere.
I used to dive when i was at school, did most of the BSAC first certificate. Loosemoose is a diver, i think he’s PADI certified to open water diver + Nitrox.
Yeah, scuba diving is great. I did the Open Water PADI course years ago, and then hardly anything since. I’d love to do wreck diving one day, but that probably won’t be for quite a while. I got into it quite randomly, just happened to be working at a scuba shop.
I’m PADI Advanced Open, & TDI Nitrox certified. Nitrox is awesome, you can stay at 40m for like 15 minutes, which beats the hell out of the 5 minutes PADI let you do on normal air.
Loose.
I took a course in college and was certified in about 1976. The only open water dives I did were in lakes where the visibility was about 10 feet. I have done about half a dozen dives.
A couple dives were in a big lake that had a thermocline at about 10 feet. You could hover above the thermocline and stick your hand down into it. The water was so cold it would make your hand ache.
I always wanted to do some saltwater dives in really clear water.
I havn’t but i deffinatly will its on my life’s to do list along with skydiving and skiing on a real mountain, anyone here skydive?
Diving in Gozo (the Med) we dived into a long narrow cave into the cliff base and we found a (near) vertical halocline - that’s saltwater one side, and fresh the other. That was spooky, because I swam through it and my buddy saw me go all blurry. The halocline was so stable you could put your hand through it and see it go blurred whilst your arm remained in focus.
As for cold: Stoney Cove - a steep sided roadstone quarry in Leicestershire, used as a training lake for divers, or Gildenburgh Water (a flooded gravel quarry in Cambridgeshire), or Dosthill in Staffordshire (imagine a deep steep sided bucket carved in the rock and filled with grey gritty ice). I regularly dived these sites all year round. In the winter, you jump in and then sit on the bottom in about 3 metres swearing with pain for two or three minutes - it’s like someone smacking you in the forehead with a frozen hammer.
Then you set off on the dive, and swim with your upper body as rigid as possible because any movement lets more cold water into your semi-dry suit and down your back. (I used a neoprene dry suit for a season or so, then a membrane dry suit, but always went back to the semi-dry for the control and simplicity.) The visibility is sometimes 2 or 3 metres, and sometimes literally nil. The lake beds are fine silt, easily stirred up by novice divers, and the silt hangs in the water looking solid, like cumulus cloud seen from above from an aeroplane.
And sometimes your DV (US = regulator) freezes and goes into freeflow, and the rapidly decompressing air hurts your teeth. Ruth’s octopus (spare DV) freeflowed in Gildenburgh once and her tank was empty before she realised. This led to an emergency ascent, fortunately only from shallow depth - where the famous big pike live.
Then you realise you can’t feel your hands, and you’re shivering with near hypothermia, and by the time you get out you are nearly crying with pain. The blood slowly returns to your fingers and you get hot aches - the only cure is to dance around the car park waving your hands and swearing, and that doesn’t cure it anyway.
Then you do it all again the next week. How I miss those heady days of subaquatic fun and frolics! 
I got my PADI cert in college, taking my open water exam in December in a 60-foot-deep geothermal mud puddle on the Utah/Nevada border. While I still snorkel regularly, I haven’t been diving with tanks in many years. I miss it, but at this point I’d want to repeat the full cert process before I’d feel safe going back down.
I did my open water dives for my PADI Open Water in Stoney Cove, that place is really interesting, full of sunken cars, a helicopter, 2 planes and even a replica of the Nautilus submarine. However, it is bloody cold, and I totally agree with the dancing in the car park trying to get warm, and shivering in the queue for a bacon & egg sarnie.
Loose.
Yay I’ve been in Dosthill in the middle of winter, ran in to some big old pike down there at around 10 metres, also some koi carp. I am however, almost impervious to cold.
I have been scuba diving in pools, and only to fix leaks.
It’s part of my job.
Koi carp? Not coy ones that wouldn’t come out as you swam past? I recall pike, roach, perch and I think native carp.
Horrible place, anyway, when the only thing keeping the water warm was the portaloo leaking into it. 
I watched The Life Aquatic last night. Does that count for anything? 
Deffinitey koi carp, although obviously I wouldn’t know if there were coy carp as well, as I wouldn’t have seen them. Apparently someone had put them in one night for a joke, they were swimming around the supports of the scaffold tower/dive platform. I doubt they lasted too long in that low quality of water.
Same here, didn’t dive anywhere I could see even that far I think, all muddy inland lakes. One of my first dives the visibility was 0.5m. I could just make out my buddy pointing to something, but I couldn’t see what, so I kept swimming closer to where they were pointing, peering over a log. Then with my nose almost touching it, realised the log was a pike bigger than I had thought fish got in lakes. I looked pretty funny trying to swim backwards pretty fast, but luckily not many people were within 50cm of me to see that.
I guess the cold is one reason I’ve never done more diving, I’m not good at being cold. I’ve got frostbite swimming (it was the antarctic, but no one else did), and hypothermia twice just canoeing in Kent. So I’d get quite annoying diving in Britain in winter.
Where in Mexico did you dive? I was down there last summer doing some dives off the Yucatan Peninsula, south of Cancun. I am SSI certified as well. I’ve been pretty bad about keeping up on my log book, but I’m at around 20 dives throughout Hawaii, Mexico, Belize, and here in Washington state.