During your first couple of years of diving what were your biggest challenges?

[lucybuykx]

I've post this separately because it deserves separate attention.

I've never had any problem with weight of gear while recreational diving. I don't recreational dive below 20 degC and usually go off boats. Weight became a problem when I trained as a DM in cold northern England and had to carry enough kilos to sink a battleship half a mile to the muddy quarry over slippery stones. (you can tell just how much I enjoyed this can't you :shakehead )

Then after a couple of weekends as an instructor. I injured my back. I had to lean over and pick things up too often while fully kitted up, hold onto stuff for students as then struggled with their kit, carry extra weight etc etc. I was in agony for about a month and it was 3 months before I put kit on again - in the pool. I'm not looking for tea and sympathy rather offering my experience so others can learn from it.

These days I organise my students and divemasters rather better. I take my kit (or get a dm to do it) down to the water's edge before organising the students. That means I can move around the group in comfort, helping and adjusting, leaning over and around without 25kg pulling badly off my back. Then we walk down to the waters edge and I kit up while they spit in their masks and faff with their fins.

Some of the lads I work with take the micky. No lets be fair, this is Yorkshire, all the lads take the micky, its the law here. But some of them actually agree with me on condition they remain anonymous.

Diving is meant to be fun. I am teaching students skills so they can have some of the best times of their lives underwater. If they see all the divers around them hauling 25kg plus weight belts all the time that is what they will think they have to live up to. And there's not a lot of folks find that kind of thing fun.

I show them that it doesn't have to be that way. You can still do all required checks and have the same amount of fun just by thinking a little differently.

 

[hnladue]

Money has almost always been the most difficult thing with diving. Then the weather!! The weight of everything doesn't bug me much. I only dive single 80's anyhow. Seems everytime we want to go out on a boat dive the weather kicks up and that's all!!

 

[girldiverllc]

When I first started diving...it was the gear. Not any one specific issue...just ALL of the gear in general.

I started diving with rental gear...each time something would fit differently or there would be a malfunction (sometimes...I would malfunction...). My first 40 dives were just plain ROUGH. Power inflator stuck, forgetting gear at home, putting the reg on backwards and having to switch it in front of everyone...

Living in the northwest, and doing lots of shore dives, meant hauling the gear up and down hills to the water. And for my first 15 - 20 dives, I was overweighted. So that didn't help when I got into the water. And my buoyancy...well, let's just say that my nickname was "Bubbles" for my open water checkout, for the number of times I headed up to the surface.

I persevered. Seeing the other divers handle everything so well, I decided that somehow...someway...I was going to make this thing work. I got my own equipment, so it fit the same every time. (Still not properly, at first...as I ran into a misguided dive store employee who said that it was ok that the BCD had a bit of extra room...) I took classes and got more experience with instructors, so my skills improved. I learned to use checklists and assemble my gear the same way..every time. I switched to HP80 steel tanks which took weight off of my belt and fit my short torso better.

I have over 450 dives now, am an instructor and have the website...diving truly changed my life.

And if I can do it...with all of the challenges that I went through...I feel like it's my calling to encourage others during their first dive experiences.

 

[TSandM]

I'm with you, Cindy, about perserverence paying off. AND about ill-fitting gear. I started with a small Libra which was too big and allowed the tank to slop around on my back, and it made things uncomfortable and more stressful than they had to be. Switching to a BP/W where the harness could be correctly adjusted made life SO much easier, and that's an option I try to recommend when I see a woman on the board asking about BC's that don't fit.

The whole thing about being female and little has been a hassle from the beginning and remains so. EVERYTHING ends up being custom (and don't ask me about the TWO custom drysuits I've bought so far . . . ) or just not fitting very well.

And as far as diving skills go, I don't think this is gender-related, but some people (like my dive buddy) were just born to do this, and the rest of us work at it. The work DOES pay off, although sometimes you just don't see the progress from day to day. (She says, having spent the last eight or ten dives attempting to learn how to dislocate her own shoulders and get those dratted valves . . . )

 

[sidneydiver]

I think as well as the weight of the equipment (I have recently started diving doubles too) I sometimes find having the confidence that I know what I know is a challenge. It's funny because I normally end up finding that I know more than I thought I did or I'm better at some of the skills than I thought I was. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing because being over-confident can be more dangerous.

 

[BubblesUp]

As the only female tech diver actively diving with my LDS, I had always felt like I was being held to a higher standard in order to be taken seriously by "the boys." My dive skills had to be sharper, my buoyancy better, and my planning skills more solid than anyone else on the boat. I later learned that the only one holding me to that higher standard was me. Part of me wishes I had known that sooner, but an even bigger part realizes that it had made me a better diver.

Like most women who have responded, the weight of the gear can be a challenge. Decked out in my double HP 100s, with two 40 cu.ft. deco bottles and a canister light, my gear weighs darned near as much as I do. However, I've learned to make smart use of leverage and the strength in my legs. I never carry a cylinder in my arms that I can carry on my back, and it's a whole lot easier to get gear into the back of a minivan than it is to hoist it up an extra foot or so onto the bed of a pickup truck. I've also learned to never turn down any offer of help - and I'm quick to offer help in return.

I do areobics to keep my SAC rate down, so I'm not the limiting factor when diving with guys carrying 260 cu.ft. of back gas. In fact, on a dive a while back, someone low on air passed three guys on the ascent line to get to me, because he figured (correctly, I'm proud to say) that I was his best bet to have gas to share.

I guess I've taken a round about way to say that I think some of the biggest challenges we face as women divers are of our own making and often they are more mental than physical.

Curious to know if others agree.

 

[TSandM]

Delia Milliron wrote a really interesting article for Quest magazine a while back about female tech divers. In the article, she says that women generally tend to be a little more conservative, and want to get everything really solid before they move on to the next challenge. Men, on the other hand, are more willing to take a flyer and see what happens.

That's certainly been true with me and my regular dive buddy. I want to take things in small bites, and not move on until I feel I've really mastered what I'm currently doing. Kirk, on the other hand, will suggest we do a dive where we add a stage bottle and do midwater air-shares in the dark with our fins off . . . Just a joke, but it's the KIND of thing he'll come up with. Like doing a night dive in significant current at a site neither of us knows that well, and shoving his reel at me and saying, "Let's do some line-running practice!"

I don't know if the challenges are of our own making, or whether we either have the feeling that, as women in what's largely a man's world, we can't afford to screw up and look bad, because it won't be viewed as a simple error, but as weakness or inability related to being female.

I know that, in my surgical residency, I always felt I had to be at least 50% better than the guys around me to be viewed as just as good

 

[scratchmyback]

I just noticed this thread now so sorry for chiming in a bit late. I love the responses and I agree with many of you, regarding the sheer weight of the gear, the self-critiques and whatnot. You've covered most of what I've had to deal with but here's my version of things. My personality is somewhat competitive and perfectionist although most people would not describe me that way. I'm sure I internalize it for the most part.

For a long time I resisted taking up any sport because I did not want to look bad in front of other people. While I understand it is not possible to learn something and excel at it by osmosis, I am simply not programmed to accept anything less than best from myself. Golf immediately comes to mind here. Forget about team sports either.

My better half is a DM and through his encouragement I decided to take up diving. I figured everyone would be much too busy doing their own thing to pay that much attention to my gaffes in the water. I have only been certified since last June and completed about 25 dives the entire year. In every dive I was overweighted. I wore an ill-fitting men's BC because I didn't have access to women's BC's unless I wanted to buy one. I could never dump all the air out of my BC and wearing 7 mil of neoprene on every dive (x2 in the core) only added to my woes. Add in equalization issues and you have a recipe for a very grumpy diver.

But I persevered because I believed it could only get better. I bought a BC that fit me. Funny thing about that - the LDS owner had no idea how to fit women in women's BC's. He kept tugging it down (over my wide hips) and I kept moving it up. Finally had to tell him it's cut for a woman, not a man. I've only had 3 dives in it so far but what a huge difference with my buoyancy. I think that was the biggest part of my problems but as a new diver, and yes as a woman, I really didn't know if it was the gear or if I just sucked. I guess I expected to suck and thus was fulfilling my own wish.

Anyway my dive season starts soon, I belong to a local dive club and I can't wait to get going this year. We have new women divers in our club this year, some will be students, I'm hopeful I can help assimilate them into our world and assure them they'll get better too.

Laura

 

[BubblesUp]

Add in equalization issues and you have a recipe for a very grumpy diver.
But I persevered because I believed it could only get better. ... I think that was the biggest part of my problems but as a new diver, and yes as a woman, I really didn't know if it was the gear or if I just sucked. I guess I expected to suck and thus was fulfilling my own wish.

Glad you stuck with it, Laura! As you learned with your BC, seemingly simple changes can lead to big improvements in trim and buoyancy. Hope you continue to maintain a healthy level of self-awareness that motivates you to practice, experiment and improve, without being overly critical of yourself. Life's too short to dive grumpy!

 

[drbill]

Finding both warm water and equipment when I was diving in the Midwest. There wasn't much of the former during winter, and little of the latter since it was the early 60's. I even had to dive solo back then because there weren't any buddies to speak of.

Whoops... Discovered I was in the Women's Forum after I posted. Sorry ladies.