I have been at this diving thing a long time, and over the years, I've had conversations about the relative safety of diving with everyone from my Mother to new students. I must confess that I still don't really know if it is or not. One thing that is clear to me though, is that diving has great POTENTIAL to be very dangerous. Even a relatively minor incident can lead to a very serious injury or death very quickly, if it isn't managed properly. When I managed a dive operation in Tobermory years ago, there were several fatalities every year up there. In almost every case, a minor event, such as a tank slipping out of a harness, or a freeze-up led to the death of the diver, and frequently, the death of the diver's buddy as well. I was a new Instructor then, and these incidents had a pretty big impact on how I looked at this sport.
In the PADI-fication of the diving world ("diving is glamorous and safe and fun and training is easy and everybody can do it bla, bla, bla") it is easy to forget that we are in a totally foreign environment, and highly reliant on some hunks of brass and rubber.
But no mistake about it, that pretty lake, or amazing ocean can kill you dead, very quickly, and with absolutely no malice. Diving is extremely dangerous IF we don't take all of the necessary steps to eliminate these risks, or at least minimize them.
Having said this, two things have always stood out to me. First of all, unlike other activities such as motorcycle riding, we as divers, have a huge amount of control over what happens to us. Riding a bike, all it takes is one distracted car driver to run a red, and you're "done". I used to ride bikes too, and within a span of 7 months, one friend was killed by a drunk driver, and another lost her leg when a farm trailer lost a wheel at night, which came across the highway and took out the bike she was a passenger on. Both accidents would have been fairly minor if my friends had been in cars, but their exposure on the bike was very high.
With regard to the OP's question, I suspect that a huge factor in his Insurer's risk analysis is his age (which, since he has retired, I assume to be at least mid to late 50s if not older). As we have seen on this forum, there have been many, many accidents lately which fall into the category of "died while diving", not "from" diving. There have been two of these fatalities in the past three years in Tobermory where the victims were "60-ish" men who suffered heart attacks and drowned.
So I thing the answer to the question "Is diving dangerous?" is "It depends". It depends on hundreds of factors that include everything from the water temperature to the health of the diver to the depth of the dive and the state of the equipment the diver is using... and a ton of other factors.
But I think one thing is clear... diving has the potential to be very dangerous and it requires serious consideration to minimize the many risks.
I have managed to survive about 5100 dives to date. I can only think of three dives where I feel (in hindsight) that I managed a bad situation rather well (or possibly got lucky!), and survived to laugh about it.
Planning for survival is a good strategy I believe. I used to teach my Advanced students to occasionally visualize a nasty situation while they were diving, and plan how they would deal with it, in the unlikely event that their "fantasy emergency" happened to turn real. I still do that myself, imagining how I would respond if my reg stopped working, or I blew my drysuit zipper or some other unlikely event. So far, so good!
