Scuba diving is one of the most meditative and mesmerizing sports around. Once you get over your initial fear of breathing from an air tank and having to regulate your ears to the ocean depths, you can relax and take in the wondrous surroundings.
Coral of every fluorescent color imaginable plays host to a dazzling array of sea life. Tropical fish look you in the eye, manta rays glide above your air bubbles and innocuous sharks casually swim by. To scuba dive, you first must be certified by the National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI) or Professional Association of Dive Instructors (PADI). Once you have your certification or C-card, you can dive with any outfitter in the world.
Not many legal activities combine excitement, exhilaration, exploration and pure ecstacy as effectively as scuba diving.
For a breath-taking sense of awe you can’t beat underwater. It’s like a drug — you long to come back for more. By going down in the world, you discover one of the ultimate highs. Every dive promises to reveal a new wonder or curiosity. For first-timers, a few bits of rock and a couple of fish can be mind-blowing. For the more experienced, the sea is your oyster — from multi-coloured, coral-encrusted cliffs, swarming with inquisitive fish, to mysterious ship wrecks.
At night the underwater world changes dramatically. It’s feeding time and the hunters emerge to chomp their way through the food chain. Spiders and shrimps leave their tubular shelters in search of food. Countless wriggling worms are drawn into the exposed polyps of brain coral. They rest for a second, then explode as they are ingested by the feasting cora. Visability, excellent by day, is reduced to a narrow tunnel of light provided by your torch. Your senses are sharpened, breathing seems louder and swaying soft corals look ominous. And all the time, Disney-esque phosphorescence sparkles around your fins in a display worthy of Fantasia.
Scuba diving is your passport to the aquatic kingdom. But diving is a risky sport and the ocean dosen’t suffer fools. Part of its attraction is the element of danger, but the risks are calculated. Equipment is more sophisticated, comfortable and safer than ever. Anyone above a minimum age (usually 16) and reasonably fit and healthy, can learn to dive. Before doing a full training course with the BS-Ac, PADI or the SAA, you need to be able to swim 200m and float without a buoyancy aid for 10 minutes. You can join a club, go through a series of weekly lectures and practical sessions in the pool, or a week’s course at a dive centre.
Many warm-water holiday destinations have training facilities where you can learn to dive in ideal conditions. Resorts may offer closely supervised “taster dives”, following 10 minutes instructions. Even seven and eight-year-old children can sample the sensation of breathing and gliding underwater. You get to know the instant thrill, but mustn’t assume you know it all. Besides the tricks of the trade, which make it more fun, you must learn a few basic physical principles to understand what happens to your body.
The water pressure above you increases as you descend. At 10m, the pressure is twice that at the surface. The increased pressure can hurt your eardrum and needs to be released. This is done by swallowing or holding your nose and blowing. As you ascend, pressure decreases, and the air in your lungs expands. If you don’t breathe out on your ascent, you risk damaging your lungs.
Because the regulator on your aqualung supplies air at the same pressure as the surrounding water, you consume air quicker at depth — twice as much at 10m, three times as much at 20m, and four times as much at 30m. You can run out of air surprisingly quickly on a deep dive. At deeper than 30m, the concentration of nitrogen within the compressed air you breathe can cause nitrogen narcosis. You feel slightly tipsy and it’s difficult to think clearly. The effect can be simply reversed by ascending.
If you go up too quickly, nitrogen that has dissolved in your bloodstream doesn’t have time to dissipate, and nitrogen bubbles form in the blood vessels and body tissues. The resulting blocked blood circulation or damaged nervous system is called decompression sickness or “the bends”. Hence the need for good training.
Always dive with a buddy. If one gets into trouble the other helps. You communicate by signals. “OK” is an “O” made by touching the tips of the thumb and forefinger. “Going up” is a thumbs up sign, and “down” is thumbs down. You learn to clear your mask underwater by tilting your head, pressing the top of the mask and breathing out through your nose. You control your buoyancy by being correctly weighted and adjusting the air in your stabilizier jacket. When you’re qualified you can dive anywhere, the range and potential is tremendous. The majority of underwater wonderlands have dive centres which have compressed air and hire equipment.
Most exciting diving destinations have competing attractions above the surface, where you can lap up the scenery, culture and history or soak up the sun on a palm-fringed beach. Cheap medium and long-haul charter flights have brought some of the best dive sites within budget. You have the choice of shore-based diving or liveaboard boats. Staying on land gives you the chance to sample other activities.
The UK is well equipped with dive facilities, and the coastline is littered with interesting wrecks and marine life, but the water is cold and visibility is often poor. The clearest waters are usually around the Irish and west Scottish coasts.
Warmer waters are in the Mediterranean and the favourite venues are Malta, Gozo, Cyprus, Crete and Corfu. The Red Sea is top of many diver’s dreams and is dedicated to watersports.
The Maldives, Mauritius and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean offer warm, clear, well-stocked waters. Good facilities on some of the 1500 coral atolls of the Maldives enable divers to make the most of sheltered fringed reefs and exposed drop-offs. Mauritius has a protective barrier reef, beyond which experienced divers enjoy wrecks and sharks. In the Seychelles, beach and boat dives from Mahe, Praslin and La Digue are good for novices. Longer boat trips go to more dramatic drop-offs.
The coast of Kenya has marine reserves which offer some protection from overfishing and shell/coral collections. Marine life flourishes and good dive facilities exist.
Malaysia and Sulawesi have great potential and improving facilities. Off the coast of Sabah in Borneo, the islands near Pulau Sipadan give divers easy access to spectacular drop-offs frequented by turtles. Many of the 7000 islands of the Philippines are surrounded by stunning coral reefs. Truk Lagoon in Micronesia is a subaquatic graveyard of ships and planes destroyed during World War II. Papua New Guniea offers some of the most abundant, diverse and undamaged reef life in the world. Off the east coast of the north island of New Zealand, the Poor Knights islands have cathedral-like archways with wall-to-wall fish in good visability.
In the Caribbean the water is warm, visibility is good and the coral/fish life blossoms in specific locations. The Caymen islands provide the best facilities for all standards of diving. Barbados and Cozumel have impressive beach and boat dives to abundant sea life and ship wrecks. Bonaire is a favourite, with excellent coral reefs on the west coast often accessible from the beach.
Cuba, Jamaica and the Virgin Islands have a number of diving spots with a colourful array of corals and a variety of wrecks. The 700 islands of the Bahamas offer a range of experiences, including drift dives, drop-offs, caverns and the enchanting coral gardens.
Some people aren't happy at the beach - they would rather be diving. And it is little wonder that scuba diving vacations typically are offered in some of the most outstanding environments on earth with world class beaches and unparalleled scenery. But scuba diving offers what really is the only way to see the sixty percent of the world covered by water. And the whole tropical paradise part is no drawback either.
What to Expect
Diving vacations are offered at hotels and resorts all over the world. They're not hard to find. Far Flung has worked to track down the world's more unique diving destinations on boats and beachs and caves far removed from the jet skis and party boats.
