Imagine yourself all geared up, standing at the edge of the boat, and making your large stride in order to enter ocean from the boat. You then bob up and down on the ocean's surface until your dive buddy enters the water. Once you and your dive buddy give each other the "OK" signal, you both deflate your BCDs and make your decent into the world that resides underneath ocean's surface. On your dive, you and your dive buddy experience the peaceful silence and indisputable beauty of the ocean's unique ecosystems. Additionally, you and your dive buddy also form new, unforgettable memories, which you will share with your friends and family after your complete your dive. As you are slowly moving through the water in order to make sure that you don't miss anything that your dive site has to offer (and so you don't quickly use up your air by raising your heart rate), you realize that there are many things that only scuba divers understand. Here are 23 things that all scuba divers understand:
1. To some degree, you panicked when you took your first breath under water because your basic instincts tell you that you cannot breath underwater.
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2. But nothing surmounts to how you felt when you were finally able to calmly breathe underwater for the first time.
3. You feel much more relaxed when you are underwater than when you are bobbing up and down with your head above the surface.
4. Each time you go on a dive you always think, "What if I see a shark?" You ask yourself that in excitement, not fear.
5. You have made at least one Scuba Steve joke when you dove with your friends and/or family.
6. Speaking of family and friends, diving has a tendency to become a family, and/or friend, outing/bonding experience.
7. If they had (or have) one, you joined your college/university's scuba club!
8. If there is one rule that you always follow, it's that you always dive with a buddy.
9. You have either witnessed, or know of, someone who, on their ascent, inflated their BCD too much and ended up shooting up to the surface just like this great white shark:
10. When you are underwater on a "deep dive" in the middle of the ocean, looking into the seemingly endless shade of blue, is like staring into the eyes of God.
11. You see more on your dive if you move slowly, and you see even more if you stay still for a few minutes because then you notice things that you wouldn't have seen otherwise.
12. These places are on your scuba diving bucket list: Australia/Fiji's Great Barrier Reef; Punta Gorda, Costa Rica; Red Sea, Egypt; Komodo Dragon National Park, Indonesia; Ambergris Caye, Belize; Silfra, Iceland; the reefs of Hawaii; and the eastern cape of South Africa (in order to see the world's largest sardine run)!
13. No matter where you travel to for a vacation, you always make sure that you go on at least one dive.
Who would have thought diving in Ireland would have been so cool?!
14. And on your vacation dives, even if you don't know anyone in the group you're diving with, you make new friends and exchange emails and the pictures you took on your dives.
15. Working to get scuba certifications is very addicting.
16. Enriched Air (Nitrox) allows you to go to greater depths for a longer period of time, and it also gives you a euphoric feeling.
17. You find yourself using "Scuba Sign Language" in everyday life; and, when you do, non-divers usually look at you like you are crazy.
18. Wreck diving is one of the coolest things that you can do as a diver because you get to see cool things that have either sunk recently or hundreds of years ago!
Yup! That's me on my Spiegel Grove wreck dive in Key Largo, FL!
19. One of the best things about scuba diving is that you get to escape all of the noise and anxieties of the world by immersing yourself in the silence of the ocean (or lake) where you can only hear the sounds of your bubbles and heartbeat.
20. The fact that you can dive in the same spot 50 times and still have a unique diving experience each of those 50 times is another reason why you love to scuba dive.
21. A third reason why you love to scuba dive is that each dive is full of surprises!
22. Diving is your addiction. Whenever you finish a dive, you begin to plan out your next dive.
23. To you, a diver, there is nothing better than experiencing the world that resides below the water's surface.
