Skin and SCUBA Diving Safe are Fun and Affordable Sports

Between Scuba diving and Skin diving, skin diving (snorkeling) is the most simple of the two types of equipment assisted diving. It requires less equipment than SCUBA diving, a mask, snorkel tube and a set of swim fins are all that is required. Even the fins are optional in shallow narrow waters. I started skin diving in the early ‘60’s in the clear mountain rivers of Arkansas. They were beautiful and combined with camping it was heaven.

These rivers were shallow and perfect for snorkeling. You start looking at fish and other underwater species in a different manner and even the rocks and gravel look differently underwater. Invariably though the skin diver soon wants the ability to go deeper under the water surface and stay longer.

Back in the days when I converted from snorkeling to self contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) all that was necessary was to purchase a tank, demand valve, backpack for the tank and quick disconnect weight belt which I made from a salvaged automobile seat belt and individual weights ordered from Sears and Roebuck. Today the student is protected by regulations requiring scuba diving certification before taking unnecessary risks.

Years ago some of my group of skydiving club friends were experienced scuba divers or at least I thought. They at least were knowledgeable enough to keep me from running out of air, rupturing my lungs or ear drums or coming up under a boat with a running motor. We started serious diving in Lake Ouachita near Hot Springs, some water was clear but a lot of the time it was pretty murky and below the thermo cline at about 20 feet it was like ice. From Ouachita we started to range out to more clear lakes like Grand Lake in eastern Oklahoma. I believe that that Grand Lake is the most clear freshwater that I ever dived. The 60 ft bottom sometimes looked only ten feet away. Later we started taking trips to Jamaica and the Bahamas and elsewhere and I have not dived in fresh water but once since.

Early on my closest friend and new diver like me could not afford a wet suit so we used a couple of layers of white cotton knit underwear in the cold water. This worked pretty well for short dives. We did not have a boat so we just waded in from the shore most of the time.

The next winter after the summer we started scuba diving the two of us worked for a construction company that was building locks and dams on the Arkansas River. One day they accidentally lost a $1,000,000 load of sheet pile off the side of a barge.

The afternoon of day after the accident I was in a meeting where the project manager discussed hiring a salvage dive company out of New Orleans who billed $300.00 per hour for two divers to come up and find the pile sheets and hook a shackle attached to a crane cable in the hole at the end of the sheet. During this meeting I got the most brilliantly stupid idea and before thinking over the job very seriously I volunteered myself and my friend to do the Job for $50.00 per hour saving the company two hundred dollars an hour. This was at a time which near entry level engineers like us were making less than $5.00 per hour so I figured he would go for it. Why not the water was shallow along the bank of the river.

Well he did agree but with stipulations that the company would pay for new twin tank backpacks with tanks and wet suits for both of us. Surprising enough they agreed and that is how we came to find out how to maneuver under water in near total darkness. The river was so muddy that below two feet it was totally dark and the only way to see with a flash light was to hold it directly against the facemask lens. Because we couldn’t even see each other we rigged a line with quick disconnect hooks from our wrists to a common rope that was used to guide the lift cable with the shackle on it.

On the first day of diving we found we needed more tanks and oil-less air compressor so that someone could be filling tanks while we worked with the other set in the water. After that we proceeded at a leisurely pace and it took about a month and a half to find about three quarters of the piling, the rest either slipped into a deep fast running area we could not work in or sunk in the mud at least we could not find it if it existed at all.

After it was decided to stop the salvage project we went back to our old jobs and got to keep the extra tanks, wet suits and compressor. Everybody was happy, the insurance paid for the piling we could not get and the Corp of Engineers was billed for the dive equipment we got to keep and the pile driving timetable for the coffer dam cells was not affected. We could find and raise the sheets faster than they could be driven.

We had been swimming in the river for half of our life and were very familiar with the currents but I would never suggest anyone with as little experience at scuba diving as we had do anything like what we did but we were young lucky and the only injury encounters were a couple of pinched fingers before we learned to use two pry bars one from either side and not get the hands under the steel while inserting the specially fabricated shackle. Luckily most of the steel was in water only about five to six feet of water and not a lot of time was spent completely underwater. Knowing what I know today I would have never taken such a job even with the experience of a open water certification as would be required today and the company should not have allowed it then.

Specialty SCUBA Diving Courses

In addition to the Closed water and open water scuba diving certification classes there are many specialty Scuba courses available as listed below. One must realize that every instructor will not be qualified to teach all courses and a diver having an interest in specialties might have to travel to get proper instruction. This is not necessaraly bad because it is possible to write off the expenses of these and other sports trips as well as the course instruction fees and future scuba diving vacations.

scuba vacations

Scuba Equipment Service

Computer Assisted Diver

Other Courses (More on these later)

Boat Diving

Cavern Diver

Dry Suit Diver

Aquatic Environmentalist

Ice Diver

Night Diver

Nitrox Diver

Public Safety Diver