Interesting. What changed your mind and does your wife still dive?
Long story and involves a number of serendipitous events.
Bit of some backstory. My wife spent a summer in Carriacou in the early 70's at the Canadian Junior College Marine Science School and spend a few months diving with that program. Hadn't done any diving since that time.
Our son learned with us as well. We went to St. Lucia and did the Open Water dives. Okay, I had fun. Something we can do on the occasional trip. We had bought our own mask, snorkel, fins, and wetsuits before we went down. Some equipment issues in St. Lucia lead us to by our own regulators after we got back. At that time, the Alberta government gave everyone $400 out of oil revenues. We used that to buy the regs. Not much of our "own" money invested. On the "just in case" principle bought ones that were sealed.
Turned out that a friend who was in the same high power rocket club (another hobby that costs a ton of time and money) was a DM. He offered to take us diving locally. We went out with him in rented 7mm and BCDs, etc. Cold mountain lakes with not much to see. My wife hated it, my son and I enjoyed it enough to go a couple of more times. Certainly was not that interesting to even consider spending the time or money to dive locally, especially not in wetsuits.
Then attended a dive weekend put on by one of the local shops. Lots of prizes and give aways. Grand prize was a Whites Nexus drysuit package - complete with undergarments. Wouldn't you know, my wife won the damn thing. Well, that changed everything. She still had no interest, so I took the suit and we split the cost of a dry suit for our son with him. That win certainly changed the economics of the enterprise. Snowballed from there.
He and I took the DM program one winter as a way of keeping active over that winter.
We traveled a lot diving as a family.
My son is a Journeyman Heavy Duty Mechanic. He was laid off from his job a few years ago and decided to go to the Canadian Working Divers Institute and get his DCBC certificate. At the same time I knew that retirement was going to happen and did my OWSI, while he was off in Ontario. We both "graduated" about the same time. He worked for about a year doing inland work, but at half the wage of working as a mechanic he went back to servicing heavy equipment.
My wife is no longer interested in diving after having a couple of "anxious" moments that occurred during the last couple of trips we did. That's cool, I go with friends, or my son, or dive on my own when we we are on trips.
My son rarely dives anymore, once a year when I drag him away from Calgary and his quad-riding buddies.
So, I've got a lot of the issues being discussed wrapped up right here. Starting and retention.
