My son's safety was never in doubt.
1. Junior is 11, not 8. He is of age to take the training.
2. Over the past few months, I have drilled him in diving safety rules. He knows never to hold his breath while on compressed air. He knows to ascend slowly.
3. The instructor has seen Junior snorkeling and knows of his comfort level in the water. In the instructor's own words, "The boy has gills." If there had been any doubt as to Junior's safety, either on my part or the instructor's, the event never would have happened.
I don't know how it is in other states, but here in the mountains of West Virginia our boys (and some girls) wander the woods with loaded firearms (gasp!) hunting whitetail deer, bear, turkey, squirrels, etc.; they ride four wheelers and motorcycles over forest roads; they canoe and kayak down mountain rivers and race their mountain bikes over some of the most rugged terrain in the eastern US. A few miles away, there is a small grass airstrip where ultralight pilots gather to fly and socialize. A few of those pilots are under 15 years of age. The youngest is a girl of 13. We don't hold our children back out of fear. We let them live. We teach them what they need to know to survive and encourage them to embrace life to the fullest. I read somewhere that West Virginia has produced more Medal of Honor winners than any other state in the Union. If true, this does not surprise me in the least.
I honestly do not understand the nitpicking that has been going on here. The "standards" that some of you keep referring to are not laws. They are guidelines; nothing more. If they were laws, then every agency would have precisely the same set of "standards." The truth is, dive training agencies came to be as primarily profit-oriented business operations. The c-card requirement by LDS operators is to protect the agencies' bottom line. If new divers learned to dive the way new drivers learn to drive a two or three ton automobile, the agencies' profit margins would decline. As an indicator of acquired skills, a c-card means bupkiss. Some of the worst, most inept divers I have encountered could proudly boast a wallet full of cards, while many of the best divers I have ever had the pleasure of diving with were not certified by any agency and had seldom, if ever, even set foot in a dive shop.
I was Junior's age when I began SCUBA diving. I was trained by an experienced (uncertified) diver who taught me the way he had learned in the Navy. We had no pool. Everything was done in open water. I dived for more than a decade without the need for a c-card. I did light underwater salvage work (sunken pleasure boats and, in one case, a floatplane); helped search for drowning victims; cleaned freshwater mussels from inlet pipes and too many other things to mention here. The only reason I finally obtained my first c-card was because my mentor passed away and I no longer had access to his compressor. I got my present OWD c-card simply because that by 1992 the parameters of my original Basic Scuba Diver certification had changed and had become too restrictive. The irony of it all is that I have never even been asked to show it.
You want to play the "what if..?" game?
Okay. What if, while driving on the interstate, a professional truck driver falls asleep and crosses the median to hit my truck head on with a combined speed of 140 mile per hour?
What if an inattentive/distracted driver runs a stop sign and hits my son on his bicycle?
What if the chemical plant a couple of miles away blows up, sending toxic gasses wafting over our city?
What if natural gas main ruptures and explodes, taking our neighborhood with it?
What if a jet airliner, taking off from the airport, has a major malfunction and crashes into our house?
The "what if...?" game can be applied to literally every aspect of daily life. One can either accept the fact that life is not entirely safe and secure and get on with living or one can hide under the bed in fear and hope that nothing happens.
I'm too big to hide under a bed, so I choose to face life head on.
I will not back down in my certainty of the rightness of my decision to let my son try SCUBA and if I have the opportunity, I would do it again. I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for the instructor who set it up. You can criticize and nitpick all you like. That is your right. This is still a free country (at least for a while, until Obama and his cronies get through with it). But my position will not change.
I would offer up the old adage about walking a mile in my shoes, but if anyone ever took my shoes and tried to walk away, he wouldn't make it out of rifle range.
This is the last I will have to say on this matter. If you guys want to continue batting this ball back and forth, go to it. I got other fish to fry.
