Candice LandauLast Updated on October 3, 2024 by Candice Landau
A Cockerell’s Nudibranch. Photograph taken at Keystone Jetty (Whidbey Island, WA) by the immensely talented underwater photographer Laura Tesler.
When I registered for my Open Water Course in 2016, I had no idea what to expect. All I knew was that I loved the water and I wanted to learn something new. I did not know that scuba diving would forever change how I viewed the world, vacations, my health, and yes, even money. Below I’ve listed some of the things you realize when you learn to dive.
1. Aliens exist, and they inhabit our planet
Ever seen a nudibranch? No? Well, if you dive you will and they will blow your mind. (Also it’s the feature pic on this post, so you have!). These slug-like creatures come in all shapes, sizes, and colors and you’ll see them pretty much wherever you go, whether that’s the tropical waters of Indonesia or the temperate waters of the Pacific Northwest. Better yet, marine life will often interact with you, the true alien in their world. Wait until a seal plays with you, or a wolf eel peers curiously out of a rocky crevice to watch you swim by. And, if you dive slowly, even the small marine life will blow your mind. Watch a starfish feel out its prey, a shrimp dance in the beam cast by your flashlight, or an octopus change color and texture in front of your very eyes. Not even the best aquarium can do the experience justice.
2. You are now a true explorer
Even if you’ve had a good dive site briefing, nothing can prepare you for the world you discover when you dip below the surface. The color, the life and the sensations you will feel will be entirely different than anything you’ve experienced before. Even if others have dived the site, you’ll see things and go places that no one has been. You may discover new marine life, or even get to explore a decades-old shipwreck. Once you’re a more experienced diver you may even start diving sites no one has ever dived before. Truly, the possibilities are limitless. And don’t even get me started on cave exploration and tech diving…
3. You can meditate, even if you found it impossible on land
I may be a little biased as I’m no stranger to meditation. I’ve tried it in many forms and still, I’ve never come closer to the sense of zen-like “presence” that you get when you dive. If you’re trying to master the ability to keep your mind in the “now,” scuba diving is for you. This truly is an activity in which the past and the future vanish. All you have is what you are experiencing: your awareness of the incredible world around you, and how you feel in it.
4. You will find out who you really are
In Shadow Divers, renowned scuba diver, John Chatterton says, “A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature. To arrive at such a state, the diver must know the creases and folds of dread, so that when it leaps on him inside a wreck he is dealing with an old friend. The process can take years. It often requires study, discussion, practice, mentoring, contemplation, and hard experience.”
Long before I’d read Shadow Divers I had the same feelings. The thing about scuba is that it puts you in touch with your primal self. There is nothing “natural” about putting on a bunch of heavy, constricting gear and submerging yourself in tens of feet of ocean water. The emotions and mental reactions you have to grapple with are the true sport of diving. I still remember my first Open Water dive, and all the mental self-talk I had to do just to remove and replace a mask. Nowadays, that mental self-talk is reserved for very different situations, usually, things that have increased my stress-level, like a heavy current, a missing dive buddy, or the feeling of narcosis.
5. The ocean needs our protection
It’s one thing to hear about ocean pollution, climate change, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; it’s entirely another to see it. Dive the same spot year in and year out and you will notice the impact man has on the environment, whether that’s as a result of overfishing, littering, mass die-offs as a result of climate change and low oxygen levels in the water, or polluted river runoff.
Sylvia Earle says it best: “Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they’ve spent time in and around the ocean, and they’ve personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet’s blue heart.”
You’ll be an advocate of ocean conservation and marine life conservation in no time.
6. The world is vast
When you start diving you realize there is more of the world to see than you had ever dreamt of, and it’s accessible to just about everyone. This isn’t just a new activity, it’s a paradigm shift. You’ll find yourself asking, “How on earth did I go this long without realizing I was missing out on seeing 70% of the world?” And yeah, you’d be right. You were. Now, every body of water piques your curiosity. What is down there? What life? What mysteries?
7. The feeling of “compression” is like no other
As you sink through the water column, the pressure your body is exposed to increases. For every 33 feet you descend in the ocean, an entire, additional atmosphere is pressing down on you. Thanks to using regulators that provide air at ambient pressure you are able to breathe as if on land. If you’re diving a drysuit, as most of us do in the Pacific Northwest, you’re also adding air to that to stop it from squeezing you in like a dehydrator baggie. No one describes this better than author Barry Lopez:
“Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.”
– And that, that feeling, well, it’s incredible.
Interested in learning to dive? Get in touch. If you have concerns about diving and simply want to give it a try, consider booking a Discover Scuba Diving session. These are great fun alone and with friends and they only take a couple of hours out of your evening.
