Scuba Diving Certification | Learn To Dive
Top 11 Reasons to Learn to Dive in 2023. What Is The Purpose of Scuba Diving?
One of the beauties of scuba diving: There is something for everybody!
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.
We all have a slightly different story about how we started diving. For some, nature first attracted us, while adventure called others. The desire to wander and travel also motivated many. For me, initially, it was about the satisfaction of rising to a challenge and voluntarily getting out of my comfort zone.
Another reason for me is that scuba diving is part of the normal evolution of humankind! And whatever goes up must come down!
But more seriously, let’s look at nine broad reasons to get a scuba diving certification. Then, we’ll look at two all-encompassing, existential reasons: awe therapy and a blue mind.
These reasons are not presented in any particular order. The top reason for you will be different than the top reason for your neighbor. That’s one of the beauties of scuba diving: there is something for everybody.
You may already have your own reason to learn to dive. Still, the following reasons may give you inspiration and motivation to commit to being the best scuba diver you can be for a lifetime of legendary underwater adventures.
1. Marine Life, Corals & Other Treasures
Many people scuba dive to see coral reefs and marine life in tropical regions. They want to see Nemo! It’s a fine reason. The variety and colorfulness of a tropical reef can be breathtaking. What we observe underwater is radically different from what we see on land.
Yet, scuba diving doesn’t have to be limited to the ocean. Marine life in freshwater can be just as intriguing. One of my most memorable dives was inland with manatees in northern Florida. And I enjoyed discovering numerous historical shipwrecks in the St. Lawrence River, bordering Canada and the USA.
The main thing is that more than 70% of our planet’s surface is covered with water. And without scuba diving, we would limit ourselves to less than 30% of our blue sphere! Being among the few people who get to see marine life and underwater treasures firsthand is a privilege.
2. Conservation & Eco-Tourism
Over time, scuba divers learn to love the underwater world and the creatures that call it home. For many of us, marine conservation has become an essential part of our lives, and we want to do our part to help protect it.
This can mean volunteering to assist in building coral reef nurseries in a remote country, raising awareness in our local communities, participating in underwater clean-up, working at rehabilitating turtles, or even deciding to take up marine conservation as a career path. It becomes diving with a mission.
One growing trend you may be interested in is eco-tourism, which merges conservation, communities, and sustainable travel.
You may even want to go back to school! Citizen science courses give scuba divers the opportunity to apply the knowledge they learn in the classroom (or online) to something practical and valuable in the real world.
If you look around, you will find a way to participate in helping our oceans while having fun scuba diving.
3. Travel+
You don’t need scuba diving to travel the world, but once you have learned to dive, I bet you will be tempted to journey to places you would never have thought of otherwise.
Scuba diving can redefine what an annual winter vacation looks like. It is no longer just about margaritas and mojitos at the pool bar!
For instance, on my to-do list, I added diving in Iceland to visit the gap between the continents and touch the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates at the same time. Before learning to dive, I would never have considered Iceland as a vacation destination.
Most people don’t like the idea of diving in cold water. However, it is really not cold if you wear the proper exposure suits. But, still, for you, it may be visiting Pacific islands off the beaten path or traveling to Australia for the great barrier reef.
Either way, scuba diving adds excitement and purpose to travel.
4. A Social Community
Otherwise, scuba diving is a social activity. On a diving day, you will spend more time at the surface with other divers, either onshore or on a boat, before and after the dive than you spend underwater.
After a while, you will establish connections with other divers with similar interests and develop a new network of friends from all over the world. It’s an exhilarating feeling to surface from a dive with your head full of beautiful images and to be able to talk about and share them with dive buddies who are just as excited as you are.
A few of my married friends have met each other on a dive site.
On that front, there is no reason to limit scuba diving to once a year during your family vacations under palm trees. You can find a local diving community almost everywhere in the world, and it will become a social club, a bit like a yacht club.
5. Exploration & Unique Adventures
Learning to dive is just Step One.
There are many specialized types of underwater adventures that you can dive into. Of course, before you get into more advanced diving, it’s crucial that you properly master entry-level scuba diving skills. You need to walk correctly before you attempt to run. And you should run adequately before you train for a marathon.
Helping you build a solid foundation in scuba diving is the reason I wrote “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving.” I hope it helps you or your friends, family members, colleagues…
Many advanced diving activities come with their own risks, skills, and equipment, like cave diving, which is very popular in some parts of Florida and Mexico. These advanced diving activities require specialized diver training to be able to truly enjoy it while being safe.
A popular form of diving is exploring wrecks, which sometimes leads to getting involved in underwater archeology and treasure hunting. Usually, there are wrecks with a rich history along every coast, lake, and river. These wrecks also serve as a habitat for marine life, so you kill two birds with one stone — not that we want to kill birds!
One famous mission among some scuba divers in Florida is looking for megalodon teeth in freshwater rivers and creek beds. See? Although Florida is known for ocean diving, it also offers freshwater diving!
Megalodon, known as the Meg, is an extinct species of shark that lived millions of years ago. It was the largest shark and one of the largest fish ever to exist at about three times the length of the largest recorded great white shark. Most vertebrate fossils and fossil sites in Florida are legally protected. But there is such an abundance of shark teeth that they are specifically exempt from the usual fossil permit requirements.
During the same week I was putting the final touch to “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving,” divers on the West coast of Florida found the jaw of a mastodon, a large mammal similar to an elephant but with fur and extinct about 10,000 years ago.
Exploration is a fun thing to do anywhere! One day, I threw my dive gear in the back of my pickup truck and headed up North to explore the lake where my family had a summer cottage when I was a kid. It was a thrill to see what was underneath us when we spent hours swimming in that lake. There wasn’t much. But I still had fun discovering it!
6. Photography & Videography
With social media and smartphones nowadays, we’re all photographers, right? Well, you will find that taking good pictures underwater is not easy. In fact, there is probably no other environment more challenging for photography than the underwater world. So, if you are into photos & videos, doing it underwater can become a passion requiring dedication to master it — an expensive passion, I must say.
Besides the need for waterproof equipment, you have to deal with issues related to magnification, lighting, and turbidity, to name a few. Light and colors change as you dive deeper. Water acts as a magnifier. And particles in suspension are not friendly to your flash!
Good underwater pictures and videos require commitment and attention to detail. That’s why taking underwater photos and videos is discouraged during your open water diver certification course. Instead, wait until you have mastered basic diving skills. In your entry-level scuba diving course, you should learn about the dangers associated with underwater task loading.
7. An Astronaut & A Bird
It’s the zero-gravity experience!
Scuba diving is the closest you’ll ever be to feeling like an astronaut, weightless and free in three dimensions. It’s simply otherworldly!
Once you have mastered the art of buoyancy (which is often neglected in open water scuba diving certification courses despite how critical it is to your safety and enjoyment of scuba diving), you can hover in mid-water as an astronaut floats in space. Underwater, you are no longer bound to gravity keeping your feet stuck to the ground or your buttocks glued to the couch. Instead, you get to move and “be” in three dimensions.
Scuba diving is so similar to spacewalking that NASA astronauts train at one of the largest indoor pools in the world, NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), located at the Sonny Carter Training Facility in Houston, Texas.
You could also compare being underwater to flying like a bird, with one significant difference: when underwater, there is stuff around you to see!
8. Underwater Meditation & Yoga
For me, simply floating in three dimensions is a good enough reason to go breathe underwater every once in a while. I call it “underwater yoga” because, well… It’s a bit like yoga. It clears my mind and re-energizes me.
Similar to breathing during meditation sessions, breathing slowly and deeply while scuba diving induces a calm, relaxed state while you focus on the underwater environment rather than think about problems you may be experiencing in your daily life.
And this aquatic therapy can be done even when there is nothing to see. For example, when I lived up North in a town that was frozen half the year, I would regularly go with my scuba diving gear in an indoor pool during winter months just to “disconnect and hover.” At the same time, it gave me an opportunity to work on improving my scuba diving skills.
The main point here is that scuba diving can be an activity on its own, even if there is nothing extraordinary to see. You may find it pleasant to simply float in three dimensions while disconnecting from your smartphone. And it gives you a reason when your boss asks why you didn’t answer that email message 5 seconds after he sent it!
9. Rehabilitation
Scuba diving is used to treat physical and emotional disabilities among soldiers and other groups of people. Scientific research conducted by Johns Hopkins University has shown scuba diving dramatically assists those with severe physical injuries and successfully reduces reported symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
There are organizations, like DiveHeart, catering to this clientele.
Although I do not suffer from these illnesses, I have always felt physically and emotionally better after diving. So there’s something to it!
In fact, scuba diving is an excellent activity for people with paraplegia and even quadriplegics. They just need a dive professional with them.
10. Awe Therapy
Awe is an emotion combining fear, reverence, and wonder in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world. That is precisely what you will feel when jumping off a boat, miles from shore, with your scuba diving gear.
The ocean is beautiful and yet mighty. It can flip that boat around and destroy beach houses in no time. It represents both life and death, depending on the day.
The good thing is that, apparently, there are benefits to feeling small and insignificant.
In a book titled “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” cognitive scientist Dacher Keltner highlights a myriad of mental benefits to awe. For example, studies have shown that experiencing wonder can reduce stress and anxiety, boost memory, enhance well-being, foster greater attention to detail, discourage rumination, and encourage critical thinking.
Wow! That’s a lot! Scuba diving as a source of awe should be required learning for all if you ask me. But I may be biased a bit!
11. A Blue Mind
Although I’ve kept this reason for last, it is probably the number one reason to scuba dive.
When Homo Sapiens first evolved, we lived in grasslands and forests and, more often than not, next to lakes and rivers, not that I was there to check on them. Apparently, it wasn’t until 2007 that we became a majority-urban species. And in North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, more than 70 percent of the population was said to be urban in 2007. By 2030, it is estimated that urban dwellers will make up roughly 60 percent of the world’s population
And as urbanization keeps on increasing, our access to nature continues to dwindle.
The loss of human-nature interaction has been linked to a rising tide of mental health disorders. In fact, there are some indications that human health, both psychological and physical, is intrinsically linked to nature. And guess what? Some experts now believe that blue spaces, such as lakes and rivers, could be even more beneficial than green ones.
And entering the water provides yet another level of healing. Immersive activities like swimming or scuba diving are believed to induce a sense of environmental “attunement” — feeling connected to or even part of the environment.
If you want to learn more, I recommend “A Blue Mind,” a landmark book by marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols in which he outlines the remarkable effects of water on our health and well-being. We benefit from being in, on, under, or near water. He shows how proximity to water can improve performance, increase calm, diminish anxiety, and increase professional success.
So… What are you waiting for? Get underwater!
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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