What you used to fear - and now you love to do

[billt4sf]

For me:

Depths greater than 50 feet

When they said "You might need a Reef hook"

Negative entries

Any current above a slow drift

 

[Bubblesong]

NIght dive: I felt such impending DOOM the first time i went on one, but have since learned why they are so special, just the sparkly water makes it worthwhile.

 

[Landau]

Definitely night dives. My first one in AOW was probably the most nervous I've been on a dive. Love seeing the difference from day now. Though locally the water isn't so sparkly.

 

[northernone]

Restrictions and tight spaces. I now enjoy slithery dives and years ago even under a dock would make me nervous.

Also no viz descents. As a kid I was scared of lake monsters and wouldn't dive where I didn't have a wall or slope to follow. Can't say I particularly love descents with no visual or tactile references but they do have a certain feeling of flying I enjoy.

 

[divinh]

Diving.

Although I learned how to swim in elementary school, I never felt very comfortable in water. This was probably due to high school, where we had to swim laps and then play water polo, where getting forced underwater abruptly was a common occurrence. Many, many years later, I took a vacation to Thailand and asked a coworker where I should visit. He said to go to Koh Tao and while I was there, I should take the diving course. I did. Over four days I worried I would miss something in the lessons, setup my gear wrong and accidentally drown myself. Of course, the instructor was very on-the-ball and made sure we were safe. The course tired me out every day, probably from absorbing the new information and perhaps from anxiety. Once the lessons were over, I did some fun dives. It was much more relaxed and I really enjoyed myself. I've been taking diving vacations every year since.

 

[TMHeimer]

Can't say I really had any fears about diving other than the fact that I had for decades only snorkeled, and not very deep. The idea of going down 20-30' in OW Course was a concern I guess, but that was short lived. One oddity I still have to a degree is being uncomfortable (not diving) going out to water that is over my head, or even close to it. Don't know why--I was always fine snorkeling down 10', etc., and did my first dive to 100+ feet without any fear at all. Swimming off a boat in 100' deep water is also without fear. But walking out from shore to near over my head without fins still gives me the heebee jeebees.We all have our quirks, I guess.

 

[Saniflush]

I was swimming from an early age and was always comfortable in the water. Add to it that when I was first exposed to scuba I was a dumb jarhead that didn't know I was supposed to be afraid of anything. I get the willies much more so now looking back on all of the knowledge that I didn't know that I didn't have.

 

[Diver0001]

Going over the NDL's.

The first time I went over the NDL (I think) was precipitated by a near accident. I chased a diver into the depths along a wall because he was ensnared in some discarded fishing line and couldn't maintain buoyancy control. He started sinking. My buddy and myself saw that and we went after him.

At that time (1985) dive computers were still far from being mainstream and we were "off the tables". We were deeper and longer than the tables indicated. That dive made a big impression on me and made me afraid of the NDL because I knew that I couldn't manage it.

Throughout my initial training and the first 10 years or so of diving I was taught to "fear" the NDL. It was a mysterious, deadly boundary between "safe diving" and "certain death". At least that's how I experienced it.

Throughout that period of time I often felt a "time pressure" during dives. I knew that the NDL was bad (or so I had been told) and that as soon as you go over your NDL the deco time starts to accumulate rapidly and that you would probably run out of air and have an accident if you exceeded the NDL. These were the myths I was taught and they were exacerbated by the fact that we didn't have any good planning tools to really understand what happened after you go over the NDL.

Fast forward to 2002. I took my initial technical training. I learned about planning for being over the NDL's and quickly learned that I had all the skills I needed to do so safely. I bought a computer that was up to the job, re-kitted my gear to be up to the job and I've never looked back.

One of the defining moments of my diving career was the day that I made my first staged decompression dive. I actually started crying during that dive because that constant feeling of "time pressure" that was the monkey on my back for more than a decade was suddenly gone.... just ... GONE! The emotional release from that feeling was remarkable.

It was a true milestone in every sense of the word. In the span of a single dive I went from worrying and feeling unsure of myself -- even though I had over 800 dives at the time -- to feeling confident and "in control" of literally every aspect of my diving.

These days I've been a "technical" diver for 15 years and I've never looked back. We dive well over the NDL's on a regular basis (about 45 times a year -- coming up on 700 technical dives to date) and since the very first time I went over the NDL's with a plan, that old fear that I had has never come back again to haunt me in the slightest.

R..

 

[Trailboss123]

Early on, I used to have some anxiety about being out over a wall with no viewable bottom below me. Concerned that I might somehow lose control of my buoyancy and descend into the abyss. The thought of doing an open ocean blackwater dive at that time would have been unthinkable.

 

[CT-Rich]

No bottom still gives me the heebie-jeebies. I used to be really claustrophobic on descent or low vis. I learned to dive in 1980, right after Jaws came out on VHS. I watched it, knowing it was bunk, well thinking it was probably bunk... thinking about the big fish that might just be beyond my sight gave me pause. Since then I have really learned to embrace that as the excitement of diving. Instead of fear it is adrenaline. Embrace the suck.