The need for various scuba training.
In the late 1960s when the California divers association began to teach scuba diving in the recreational side it started a phenomenal sport that has swept this country. It was television shows like my all time favorite “Sea Hunt,” and it wasn’t reruns of the show it was the original version. That show inspired many young folks (at the time) like me to want to see the underwater world for the first time.
At that time you couldn’t go down to your local dive shop because frankly they just didn’t exist. If you had a local YMCA they would give you an introductory scuba course after you took their swim course. If you were interested in the scuba you had to seek out an instructor that they approved. Fortunately for me it was my brother-in-law at the time.
So the journey began. At that time in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s your basic open water certification was all they had. There were no specialty courses like advanced open water or rescue courses, it was just called scuba.
In that course we learned in great detail the basic gas laws for air under pressure and at depth. These classes were several weeks long, then we were able to get in the pool after you passed the exam. Once the pool portion began it was also several weeks long at least two nights four hours each week. By the time you were able to go to the open water portion you had the equivalent to a rescue certification. In other words, you where a well-trained scuba diver.
Through the classroom portion we learned how to plan our dives using the U.S Navy dive tables to predict the nitrogen absorption in our bodies. We also learned how to “Drown the Rat” which is to calculate the residual trace nitrogen after the surface interval after each dive or repetitive dive.
Then the pool exercises we had to go through. They were very intense and grueling. You would be swimming underwater and without notice the instructor or their assistant would come and rip your mask off your face just to see if you would panic. Then they might grab your regulator out of your mouth to the same end. If you didn’t panic then you could proceed with the rest of the class and that was during the introduction portion. That would weed out at least 50% of the students. At the time I thought it wasn’t fair to do it that way but looking back it made sense because the equipment was not as sophisticated as it is today, by that I mean there was no redundancy with an alternate air source (octopus second stage regulator) to breathe on.
There was so much training involved before you where ready for the open water portion of your training but I will say that you where very confident that you could safely dive and survive most any failure that could happen with your equipment or the environment that might happen.
This is a repeat of a column that appeared in 2022.
Russell Miller #59999
