Scuba diving is a incomparable and great experience that everyone ought to try at least once in their lifetime. Nevertheless, without proper training and preparation, scuba diving can also be a dangerous undertaking, with hazards that can affect the unprepared. With proper equipment and precautions, however, it is a safe and wonderful thing to do. Here are a few safety tips for the beginning scuba diver to consider before taking up diving in earnest.
Going underwater isn't just putting on a wetsuit and then jumping off the boat. Given that there are some dangers, here are some useful tips that are strictly enforced especially when taking a vacation in a private resort.
1. Training - Get certified. Take a training course that has official certification. If diving only for sport while on vacation like some people do, make sure that you have a certified instructor accompanying you on your dive. If diving in earnest, take a course that will actually give you a certificate for diving (not necessarily as an instructor, but one that will register you as a certified and capable scuba diver).
2. Proper equipment is a must - your training and certification should also include care and maintenance of the scuba equipment. If you're using your own equipment, make sure that you take excellent care of it, keeping it in top condition. No matter how skilled you are at navigating underwater, man is NOT biologically aquatic, and your equipment is all that's keeping you alive down there. If renting equipment, give it much more than a cursory once-over. Examine it carefully to make sure there are no flaws in the gear that might cause it to fail during a dive. One of the hazards of scuba diving is drowning if your breathing apparatus gives out.
3. Before diving from the boat, divers should always check the equipment. There are people who prepare the equipment but you should double check to make sure the oxygen gauge is full, the zippers and the locks on the wetsuit and the fins are working and the goggles aren't foggy.
People who do not check on the equipment will have to surface immediately ahead of the others thus ruining the underwater adventure.
4. Learn the basic signs used underwater.
5. Don't Dive Alone - Always have a dive buddy or an instructor with you, as long as you are with someone who has more experience than you. If you're diving with a buddy, don't bring along someone who's also a newbie if you yourself are new to the game. If you're an old hand diving with a noobie, make sure that your partner knows how to follow your instructions once underwater. If you MUST dive alone, then at least have someone manning the boat on the surface to make sure you've got a buddy on overwatch.
6. Avoid Places Where Bad Things reside - your training and certification in scuba will include a ranking that determines what levels of underwater hazards you're trained to tackle. Avoid any places that you aren't certified to handle. These areas will usually be very dangerous for the untrained, and will usually include special hazards that need their own branch of specialized scuba training or certain pieces of equipment to overcome. Examples include scuba diving in shark infested waters, ice floes, amongst coral reefs with toxic or aggressive underwater lifeforms, underwater caves, and shipwrecks.
7. Physical Conditioning - see a doctor before taking up scuba. Make sure that your doctor gives you a clean bill of health for the physical exertions required in scuba diving. While mentally relaxing, scuba diving involves enough physical effort that people with weak cardiovascular and especially respiratory systems can't indulge in it. Asthma, a weak heart, tendencies for asphyxiation, all of these can disqualify a person from scuba diving.
8. Study conditions before the dive - listen to weather reports before the dive to make sure you don't wind up diving during a typhoon or worse, a thunderstorm. Even if the conditions seem okay for diving, make sure to pack enough medical equipment to compensate for sudden changes in the weather. Even if it's a heat wave and not something related to wind and rain, adverse weather can be problematic. Heat waves have been known to cause heat stroke and dehydration
Scuba diving is a lot of fun. By learning the basics, you will be able to enjoy the adventure time and again in different dive spots across the country to see something different that is better than what Sea World has to offer.