Ishie
Guest
Scuba_Vince:
Hi Vince,
On being nervous, while the open water has numerous factors you will not see in a pool, simply remember that the principle is the same. There's water over your head.
Have you been in open water before sans scuba gear? In scuba gear, you have a distinct advantage. You can breathe. If you're swimming around and you get tangled in something, you have less than two minutes before you're going to drown. If you're in scuba and you get tangled in something, you have tools and somewhere between 15 minutes and an hour to work it out. Not to mention a buddy to assist.
The breathing thing is crucial. Some scuba divers, if something gets scary, forget they can breathe. My regulator is my security blanket. No matter what goes wrong under water, I can breathe. If something is wrong with my gear (which if serviced correctly almost NEVER happens), I can breathe off my buddy.
For fatal accidents, there are fatal accidents in everything. Diving, for a sport, has a very low accident rate. In diving, like any other sport, there are mistakes that very occasionally lead to tragedy, uncharacteristic stupid stunts that lead to tragedy, and of course, participants who have no business doing it either for physical or psychological reasons.
Many diving fatalities are actually heart attacks. It is tragic and the typical delayed access to emergency facilities (plus assumptions that the problem is caused by diving) may reduce survival, but the same thing is true of people who hike or for that matter, live alone. In the cases of those that die in actual diving related accidents, you have different types. The rarest cases are those diving within their ability level taking proper precautions. Other times, you see some people showing off, trying to 'best' their own records, or being pressured into a situation they feel uncomfortable doing ("trust me" dives). You also see inexperienced people diving outside their limitations, either trying out sites that are for more experienced divers, entering unfavorable water conditions, going deeper than they know they should, etc. You also have the people who seem to be making a concentrated effort to kill themselves. In the late 70s, a guy died in Carmel because he and his buddy (who remarkably lived) decided to plan their first dive after certification off the most notoriously dangerous beach in the area with a PLANNED depth of 250 feet on doubles. The knucklehead who died added to the list of "diving fatalities" that, though a short list comparatively, scares sane people out of the water when they would never conceive of anything so stupid.
You talked about the safety of a swimming pool. Do you have any idea how many people die in swimming pools? It's more than die diving. Places with a lifeguard on duty are of course safer, but people still die doing things as simple as diving in wrong and breaking their necks. Private pools, either owned by a homeowner or an apartment complex, in which there is no lifeguard on duty, kill even more people. If you get knocked out or faint while scuba diving, it's still dangerous, but you have a buddy and an air supply to get you out of it. If you get knocked out or faint while swimming alone in a pool (which is not considered to be a 'risky activity'), you're dead.
A little anxiety about the situation is normal. Once you are comfortable in the pool (and a good instructor will work with you until you are), try out the open water. Your instructor will be there to help you. You may, upon trying out the open water, decide that it was a good experience to have, but you never ever want to do it again. That's fine. Someone who is diving because they paid for the class, or are trying to do something for another person, but can never feel comfortable underwater is more likely to have trouble down the road. Not every sport is for everyone. Personally, fishing scares me, because I have this mental "hook in the eye" image, though I know it isn't based on a common occurence.
Something you may find reassuring on the fatalities in scuba diving:
"In a recent year over 140 people died scuba diving, 856 bicycling, over 7,000 drowned, 1154 died of bee stings, and 80 by lightning. In 1982, 43,990 people were killed in highway accidents, 1,171 boating fatalities, 235 airline deaths, and 1,164 light aircraft general aviation fatalities."
When people tell me I'm crazy for diving because I'm going to get killed, I tell them that I am statistically FAR more likely to die on the trip to work.
Good luck!
