Who or What Inspired You to Dive?

[Stryker]

The reason I got into it is that I have done everything else I have wanted to do; learn to fly, skydiving, spelunking, rappelling.... It seemed like a different kind of exciting.. Plus I have always wanted to get into cave diving... I guess I must be crazy because the thought of surviving something that people have died doing makes me feel special.. haha

 

[Lawman]

and suddenly could see in the water. I headed for my LDS and signed
up. I loved SCUBA. Lakes, The Great Lakes, wrecks, and then the ocean.
I've enjoyed every minute underwater. It's like walking through a huge
garden full of interesting creatures.

I was 60 when I put on a SCUBA outfit for the first time. By 61 I had
AOW, Stress & Rescue, Wreck, Deep and Nitrox. I'm most of the way
through Divemaster now but the physical stuff is catching up with me.
I'm 64 now. Oh well, it's just fun to learn about and to do.

ScubaBoard had done a lot to maintain my interest during the cold Michigan
winters. Divers are good people.

 

[menemsha43]

I think it was watching some documentaries with Jacques Cousteau in the late 70s/early 80s. When I was 10 or 11 or so I used to ask my Mom to take me to the scuba shop just to look at the gear. Lol.

 

[Rookie_J]

i've always loved the water and have spent many many hours snorkeling, always wanted to take the next step.

and luckily here i am, it is more than i imagined...

 

[Jan76]

Decided to go on holiday in South Africa and planned to see the "great white" during a cage dive.

Thinking a scuba certificate was necessary for the cage-dive (more like snorkling) I started to take PADI OW diving classes back at home in the cold Dutch waters.
I loved it right from the beginning. Had a great cage dive and made numerous "normal" dives during that and other holidays. Back home I'm diving almost every weekend ...as long as the temperature is above 8 degrees that is .

Never thought it could excite me as much as it did.

 

[Tom Smedley]

Freddie Joe Taunton - Yep - Freddy Joe was the one....

 

[Diversauras]

Back at the beginning of time (so to speak) Walt Disney made the first 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie, then there was Mike Nelson and later the "Aquanaughts" but I think that only lasted a season in the early '60s. There was the book "World Without Sun". These got me hooked on the idea. New England Divers finished it off and taught me. That year when we stopped at McDonalds a cheese burger, fries and a coke were less than a buck and the first set of twin '72s that I bought cost $110 new, those were the days...

 

[Firebrand]

Wow, there are some great stories here. I grew up in sunny, Tampa/St. Petersburg area of Florida and made a trip nearly every year to Key West for lobster season. We would stay within snorkeling depth to get the lobster and I even got to watch a 4 foot long bonnet-head shark eat a lobster my step-dad and I had just released (I was 15 when that happened)! My step-dad used to co-own a dive shop in Florida and was a PADI instructor for years, and was the aquatics director at Saint Petersburg Junior College. However, he had to stop teaching aquatics and scuba diving due to some skin cancer showing up, and he didn't maintain his instructor status when I was old enough to learn. I had always wanted to scuba dive, and my Marine Biology classes in high school confirmed that. However, I kept saying, "I live in Florida, I can get certified whenever I want to," and never did. To fast-forward a few years, I then started college and was in ROTC, got my commission in the Army, and found myself stationed in Huntsville, Alabama. I then found there are three large dive shops in land-locked Huntsville, signed up and finally got certified at the rock quarry. As fate would have it, I got picked up by CENTCOM for a 6-month assignment in Tampa and am getting in some spring diving waiting for the gulf to warm back up to do some sharks tooth hunting in Venice Beach.

 

[padiscubapro]

I wonder how many have images like this to thank!

 

[solo_diver]

Hey There Folks,
With all the threads about Books, and Greatest Divers, I thought I would pose this question. What got you into Diving?
For me it was seeing those Cousteau shows when I was a little kid in the seventies.
And then pretending with a snorkel and mask in my local swimming hole.
Then I became like most of us interested in Marine Biology, I have a cousin that is a MB. And if Music would have never stolen my heart I would have pursued Marine Biology or Oceanography. In some ways getting certified and get addicted and consumed with Diving, Marine Life, Reading about these subjects is one way of
re-connecting with my earliest dreams and also discovering something totally connected to my life now.
I am curious for all of you how did it happen for you?

For me my first memory is spending time making sand castles with my mother on the beach. We were in Monterrey, California. The sea and water in general turned out time and time again in my life to be a source of fun and relaxation. As a boy scout in Wisconsin we would spend an hour a week in a public pool in the winter. It was fun going down and holding my breath, but because I couldn't stay down very long I began to wish I could bring some air with me. I thought about bags full of air and plastic tubs my friends and I could bring down and we could pop our heads in the air tight tub, but none of it ever worked. My mother and I spent time watching Cousteau and a light bulb went off over my head: I had to learn to do this. But that seemed more like a fantasy.

Then I moved to the Desert: Phoenix, AZ. (not much water around here). I needed to get my h20 fix. I started to build aquariums and swim at the local YMCA. But none of it satisfied. My neighbor and good friend told me "Mike, if you were to learn to dive then you could get all the fish and corals you wanted..." and that comment sparked a fire under my ... self and I signed up for a lesson.

So I'd have to say Cousteau had something to do with it, my mother did, and my friend Charlie.

That's an odd group of people actually..