How long have you been diving?

[kathydee]

I'm a baby scuba diver compared to many on this site. My first "dive" with scuba was in the early 80's but I wasn't certified 'till '06. Caught the scuba bug in '08 (with about 36 dives) and have been diving non-stop every since ;-).

 

[sphyrnidus]

Started 1968, I was 15...


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[Splitlip]

Some years back I met a guy who proudly told me he'd been diving for over 30 years, and had almost 300 dives.

I told him I'd been diving about a year and a half and had more dives than he did ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Bob:
I simply never "logged" a dive till 1999. Even then, it only lasted one booklet thing. Now I can check my computers. I never considered anything more shallow than free dive depth to be a scuba dive. Never considered picking up trash in water you can stand up in as a dive. I never considered a hookah dive as a dive.
Fact is, I really just don't log dives. I'll change my profile, but that always seemed kind of arrogant.

 

[captain]

Bob:
I simply never "logged" a dive till 1999. Even then, it only lasted one booklet thing. Now I can check my computers. I never considered anything more shallow than free dive depth to be a scuba dive. Never considered picking up trash in water you can stand up in as a dive. I never considered a hookah dive as a dive.
Fact is, I really just don't log dives. I'll change my profile, but that always seemed kind of arrogant.

I too never really logged all individual dives. I would sometimes log dive sites if I found a particularly good one but would not log multiple dives on the same site. Never saw much value in logging every dive.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Bob:
I simply never "logged" a dive till 1999. Even then, it only lasted one booklet thing. Now I can check my computers. I never considered anything more shallow than free dive depth to be a scuba dive. Never considered picking up trash in water you can stand up in as a dive. I never considered a hookah dive as a dive.
Fact is, I really just don't log dives. I'll change my profile, but that always seemed kind of arrogant.

That comment wasn't aimed at anyone in particular ... especially not on ScubaBoard. Lots of people don't log dives, and we have a lot of very experienced divers here from a wide variety of backgrounds.

My intention was really to point out that number of years diving isn't always a good measure of someone's experience level. Bottom time is a better measure ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Akimbo]

…My intention was really to point out that number of years diving isn't always a good measure of someone's experience level. Bottom time is a better measure ...

I bring the bias to the conversation that the time underwater, location, and what was being done is the true measure of experience. “X” number of beach dives in 50' of warm clear water isn’t really comparable that many dives in the North Atlantic 10+ miles offshore.

Several of us on this board have had saturation dives that lasted more than 30 days with 4-8 hour lockouts/day, plus days of decompression… a single sat dive is “seal to seal” (when the hatch seal is made at the start of pressurizing until the seal “breaks” when the chamber pressure equals the surface). The same number of hours teaching an OW class is not equal to making videos of whales on rebreathers. A big part of a diver’s skill is the time spent in preparation. A wreck diver doing research is adding to their skills even though they don’t leave the library or museum. Signing up for a liveaboard is not the same as organizing an expedition to a small island in the Bearing Sea.

Any measure has its flaws but the number of years has implications beyond a diver’s skills.

 

[maniago]

... neither this poll, nor the membership of ScubaBoard in general, are representative of the industry. People who spend time posting on here tend to be more dedicated to scuba diving than the majority of people who get OW certified ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

+1. I don't really see the point in the poll, though I'm just out of scuba diapers at 3yrs. The question doesn't really tell us anything except who's posting while at work, IMHO.

I think if you ask the same question of any number of hobbies (take golf for example), you get the same representative answers...though I can't remember if I was ever on a golf forum...

 

[drbill]

I don't think the number of years one has been diving is a great measure of skill. I've known divers who were active since the early beginnings of SCUBA who flailed along and had questionable buoyancy skills, and I'e known fairly new divers whose trim and buoyancy were spot on. Someone doing 5,000 dives in warm tropical waters may not have the skills of a person with 1,000 dives but in a variety of different conditions.

However, all the OP asked for was how long we have been diving, not how skilled we are (an often highly subjective assessment anyway).

 

[Hank49]

Thanks everyone! Actually, I was surprised by the number of "over 30 year divers."

Wayne

It'd be interesting to see how many of the 20 plus year divers who are still active are also active in other water activities. Fishing, boating, sailing, free diving, surfing…among others. I would guess more are and that they live on a coast of some type, indicating that if you don't live by the sea or some nice water, diving is time consuming and expensive. This kind of ties into the thread about why more people aren't diving.

 

[DCBC]

I don't think the number of years one has been diving is a great measure of skill... However, all the OP asked for was how long we have been diving, not how skilled we are (an often highly subjective assessment anyway).

Bill, the reason for my question was not to determine experience. The number of dives a person does is a better indication than how long ago they were certified. As you've mentioned, even the number of dives is not always an indicator because 1000 dives to 30 FSW in bathtub water isn't an accurate measurement in-itself of diver competence.

When a diver was certified does however indicate what s/he was taught at that time. The content of instructional programs has changed greatly over the past 30 or 40 years. If a diver was certified 30 years ago, they qualified in an environment that required the diver to possess a greater level of in-water ability and also necessitated them to understand diving theory in greater depth. This doesn't however indicate that they retained this level of ability. The level of technology that Divers were required to utilize, is much different than commonly found today. I understand that this was only an initial program; some divers have taken subsequent courses, while others have refrained from doing so.

I just thought that this was an interesting question as its provided me a much better idea of the training philosophy in-which the respondents have been initially exposed to.