Scuba Diving Certification | Learn To Dive
Four Initial Mistakes by People Who Decide to Learn to Scuba Dive
If you start on the wrong fin, you may end up never going scuba diving after completing your open-water diver course. It would defeat the purpose of learning to dive in the first place!
Darcy Kieran is the author of the handbook “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving: How to Increase Safety, Save Money & Have More Fun!” and other books & logbooks for scuba divers, divemasters & instructors.
There are four distinct mistakes regularly made by people who decide to learn to dive. Making any or all of them would start you on the wrong fin and probably result in you never going scuba diving after completing your entry-level open-water diver course. It would defeat the purpose of learning to dive in the first place!
The first step a person typically undertakes after deciding to learn to dive is shopping for the price of a scuba diving course. It’s mistake Number One because not all scuba courses are the same, even when they are done under the same brand or dive training agency — or even in the same dive center!
So before shopping prices for an open water diver course, you should know what you want in that course, or you will be short-changed.
Instead of shopping for a course, you should select and hire a good dive instructor, akin to hiring a new employee or recruiting a lawyer. All lawyers operate under the same rule of law. Yet, some lawyers are worth much more than others!
The second common mistake made by wannabe divers is to try it out first. Short and fast scuba diving experiences are very popular in resorts worldwide. They are marketed under many names like Discover Scuba Diving, Try Scuba, Scuba Discovery, and Resort Dive.
Why is it a mistake? It would be like a toddler saying: “I’ll go on a hike in the woods to see if I like walking,” before working on learning to walk. I can guarantee you that the hike will not be enjoyable, and based on that criteria, nobody would learn to walk because repeatedly falling on your face is not fun.
The first step to successfully learning to dive for a lifetime of legendary adventures is to commit to doing it right. And it requires more than the quick tea-bagging overpriced experience you will find in tourist traps – I mean, tourist destinations.
Another common initial mistake is to google “learn to dive” and fall prey to the marketing propaganda of dive training agencies that want you to enter your credit card number to “start learning to dive now” on their expensive online learning platform.
The most crucial initial step is selecting the right dive instructor. Once that is done, you should complete the course’s academic part with the training material of whatever dive training agency your instructor is affiliated with. Don’t lock yourself in a dive training agency before selecting the instructor.
If you want to get a feel for what learning to dive looks like, you will find plenty of free resources and videos online. And some dive training agencies offer free online learning because their goal is to get you to enjoy the underwater world, not to squeeze a considerable amount of money out of your wallet for information that is freely available on YouTube.
The fourth major mistake new scuba divers make is to focus on completing the entry-level open-water diver course as fast as possible so they can go diving.
Wait! Take a deep breath! The course itself should be a fun activity if you select the right dive professional, dive location, and dive center. You start scuba diving the first time you put your head underwater and breathe from a scuba cylinder, even in a pool, for an entry-level course!
Learning to dive should not be like my engineering classes. In that case, it was true that we had to survive the elimination rounds (called exams) to get out of the university and start working as an engineer (and discover that nothing we had learned in school was useful).
Learning to dive is diving! And with the right dive instructor, what you will learn will provide you with safety, performance, and fun for years to come.
So, instead of seeing the scuba diving course as a hurdle to jump over and be done with, I urge you to focus on learning to be safe and have fun while scuba diving, including while doing your entry-level course. If you select the right dive instructor for you, it would be normal to want to go diving more often with that dive professional instead of wanting to be done as quickly as possible.
It’s for that purpose that I recommend looking for a dive instructor who will behave as a coach instead of a peddler of certification cards.
There are a lot of decisions to make while scuba diving, many of which can mean life or death. For example, you will carry your own air supply to breathe in an alien world. And you will operate unfamiliar equipment to float in mid-water and swim along fish or around a century-old shipwreck. So, there is much to learn, practice, and get used to.
To be safe, have fun, and spend money on what you actually need, you will have many decisions to make, and the first one is recruiting a good scuba diving instructor for your particular needs and spending as much time as possible with him or her.
So keep your money for the dive instructor and spend as little as possible on overpriced online learning rackets promoted by dive training agencies focused on satisfying their cash-hungry private equity owners instead of helping you enjoy the underwater world.
By the way, I explain in detail how to find the right dive instructor for your particular needs in this book: “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving: How to Increase Safety, Save Money & Have More Fun!”
Also, from Darcy Kieran:
- Handbook: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving: How to Increase Safety, Save Money & Have More Fun!
- The Best STARTER Scuba Diving Logbook & Checklists while getting your open water diver certification!
- Handbook: Your Career and/or Life as a Scuba Diving Instructor: How to Make a Good Living Out of Your Passion for Scuba Diving!
- The Best ADVANCED Scuba Diving Logbook & Checklists for certified scuba divers, divemasters & dive instructors!
- Reference book: Scuba Diving Industry Market Reports & Statistics.
And if you want to have a taste of scuba diving while you are bored at the office, have a look at my novels with a scuba diving twist, starting with “Mystery of The Blue Dragon” and “Shadows on Ocean Drive.”
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