An Introduction to Scuba Diving
Ever since I have been very little I have always been in love with the sea. My family would often take us to the beach to swim, or sail our yacht out to the small islands just off the coast of Australia to go snorkeling within the beautiful coral reef that exists there. However, it wasn’t until I was fifteen that I went first scuba diving, and it has since been one of my greatest passions to go diving all around the world at the most amazing of locations. There’s nothing like feeling like you are in zero gravity whilst being surround by brilliant coral and tropical fish!
Scuba diving is a sport or hobby that has grown in popularity over the last twenty years or so, as improved technologies in tanks and wetsuits are making it increasingly more easy for people to get started. For recreational divers, there are many areas around the world that offer shallow water diving, which provides as little risk as possible and as little equipment needed; the oxygen tanks are often small and easier to carry, and in most cases there is no need to wear a wetsuit. On the other end of the spectrum is deep sea diving, which should not be attempted by anyone who does not have extensive professional diving experience, as there are increased risks in diving to these kinds of depths, and the types of tanks and wetsuits needed become more intricate.
Generally speaking, The purpose of a neoprene wetsuit is to conserve body temperature. This is done by trapping a very thin layer of water between the diver and the wetsuit, which acts as an insulator to stop body heat from escaping. It’s quite important to get a wetsuit properly tailored for your body, as a wetsuit that is too large will trap too much water which reduces its effectiveness, whilst a wetsuit that is too small will limit range of movement. General scuba tanks carry between three and eighteen liters of volume, with a pressure of somewhere between two hundred to three hundred bars (three thousand to four and half thousand PSI).
If you are at all interested in scuba diving, it would be beneficially to first grab yourself cheap wetsuit and a snorkel (there are places to go for snorkels and wetsuits for sale all over the internet), to get used to the feeling of diving in shallow waters. Then take a scuba diving course and get your Grade I certification, which allows you to dive in open waters. From here, it’s up to you how far you take your diving. The license to deep water dive takes many hours of diving experience, but for most people, recreational diving is all they ever want, and provides all the pros of the hobby, whilst minimizing the cons.
