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Top Scuba Diving Myths & Stereotypes. Is Scuba Diving Dangerous? Are Sharks Dangerous?
An overview of scuba diving myths often brought up by people ready to learn to dive and get their open water diver certification.
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 two unique logbooks for divers, divemasters & instructors.
Let’s clear the air with an overview of a few myths, misconceptions, and stereotypes regularly brought up by people thinking about getting an open-water scuba diving certification.
Scuba Diving Myth: “Sharks are dangerous!”
Okay, fine! Let’s talk about sharks!
The fear of sharks is mostly a media-created hysteria. Fear sells. And it is easy for movie producers to create fear using sharks like Steven Spielberg did with Jaws in the 70s.
The “unknown” represents one of humanity’s fundamental fears. And the underwater world, before you discover it while scuba diving, is a gigantic, deep, powerful unknown world — and so are its inhabitants like the sharks.
But now, for the record, Spielberg regrets Jaws. In 2022, he said Jaws’ influence on the decimation of the shark population was deplorable. “That’s one of the things I still fear — not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975,” he said.
In reality, the first time you will see a shark while scuba diving will be a memorable experience. And the shark will most likely swim away because you are a strange monster making weird noises.
Sure, there are “shark attacks,” but the media disproportionately cover them. Considering the growing number of humans in the ocean daily, shark attacks and bites are quite rare. Boating on the way to the dive site may be more dangerous!
In 2021, the US Coast Guard counted 4,439 boating accidents resulting in 658 deaths and 2,641 injuries. Meanwhile, during the same period, 47 shark bites were reported in the USA, based on the International Shark Attack File (ISAF). Worldwide, in 2021, there were 73 unprovoked bites and 39 provoked bites by sharks.
The Florida Museum of Natural History defines “provoked shark bites” as those that occur when a human initiates interaction with a shark in some way, which includes cases when scuba divers are bitten after harassing or trying to touch sharks, bites on spearfishers, bites on people attempting to feed sharks, and bites occurring while unhooking or removing a shark from a fishing net.
Shark attacks on scuba divers are extremely rare. It is much more likely for a beach swimmer or surfer to be the target of a shark. And when it happens, it is probably because the shark mistakenly takes that person for a distressed seal flapping at the surface.
If you feel safe going to the beach, you should feel much safer going scuba diving.
Some scuba diving activities can make it more dangerous for shark attacks, like spearfishing and carrying bleeding fish with you. That is pretty easily prevented: shoot fish with a camera, not a speargun! And if you are into spearfishing, well… That is an advanced diving activity beyond the scope of this post.
So, I cannot tell you that sharks are not dangerous when scuba diving, but they are not a significant danger. And there are tips on diving with sharks, which we will cover in a forthcoming post (subscribe to be in the loop).
For now, let’s note that humans are generally not on sharks’ menu. The joke on that topic is that sharks do not like scuba divers because it gives them gas.
Sharks will bite humans mostly out of curiosity or to defend themselves. And let’s keep in mind that we are entering their natural habitat. There is no such thing as “shark-infested waters.” It would be like saying “human-infested houses.”
The most dangerous animals you will encounter when scuba diving are those with you aboard the dive boat. In 2016, for instance, more than half a million people died at the hand of other humans, while only four died from sharks.
“Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you’re lucky enough to see lots of them, you’re in a healthy ocean. You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don’t see sharks.” ~Sylvia Earle
“Scuba diving is for everybody. It’s easy!” vs. “Scuba diving is not for everybody. It’s hard!”
Scuba diving started as a macho activity taught by instructors with a Navy Seals mentality. And to this day, many people perceive scuba diving as hard because they can’t comprehend how somebody could possibly enjoy breathing underwater or because they see people carrying what looks like heavy equipment on their backs on a rocking boat.
In the 1960s, some people decided to make money by bringing scuba diving to the masses. They created recreational dive training agencies and started promoting scuba diving as “easy” and for “everybody.” They succeeded at bringing more people underwater, but at the same time, they dumbed down the course content, which led to people not being ready to dive and dropping out right after their entry-level scuba diving certification. It backfired! And to this day, dive training agencies are still on that path. Their financial focus is on selling course material and c-cards, not on preparing people to dive for years to come, which is less profitable for them.
The reality is that scuba diving is neither easy nor difficult.
Let me ask you something. Is walking a difficult thing for you to do? Of course, not. You leave your desk and walk to the coffee machine without thinking about it. You might even be reading this on your iPad while walking. You do not need to consciously tell each foot what to do. Walking is natural. But it wasn’t natural when you first tried it as a toddler. You fell face-first repeatedly!
And then, learning to walk led to many other activities with their own sets of risks, like crossing the street or hiking in the wilderness.
Scuba diving is similar. At first, it will be weird to be breathing through your mouth underwater while floating in three dimensions because you are used to breathing through your nose with your two feet resting on solid ground.
But once you get the hang of it, breathing underwater will be just as natural as walking it is for you now. This is unlikely to happen, though, until you have done at least a few dozen dives, provided that you received proper training right from the start. In your entry-level course, you will typically do only four dives which will be the equivalent of the first four times you tried walking and fell on your face.
Listening to marketing propaganda telling you that “scuba diving is easy” may put you in the frame of mind that you do not need to work on it, ultimately leading you to fail at having fun underwater. Learning to walk required a lot of perseverance as a kid. It did not happen by itself, just by hanging around somebody who could walk. Similarly, you will not become a good diver just by hanging around a dive instructor for a few minutes.
You may not remember when you learned to walk, so consider bicycling.
Nowadays, I get on my bike and start pedaling without thinking about it. I do not stop to contemplate the fact that I need to maintain balance. My body does it automatically while I think of something else. That is how you should eventually feel as a diver, but only if you commit to it because it requires more than the four open water dives included in your entry-level scuba diving certification course, especially if the dive instructor cuts corners all along the way.
Besides, once you reach the state of being comfortable underwater, you should be proud of yourself, and therefore, I would never say that scuba diving is “easy.”
Scuba diving is a challenge, and we should be proud of rising to that challenge.
Myth & Stereotype: “Scuba diving was for my grandfather!”
Yes, you often see a whole lot of older white men on dive boats, but hold on!
Sure, many older divers casually do easy diving in shallow water on a protected reef under tropical skies. But if you think scuba diving is not extreme enough for you, try penetrating deep inside flooded caves, diving down along the underwater structure of an oil rig while the boat is being rocked by 10-foot (3 m) waves, swimming under ice in a lake at the foot of a glacier, diving without doing any bubbles with a rebreather that will make you look like a navy seal, and so much more.
Your entry-level scuba diving training will be far from all of this, and you don’t have to make scuba diving an extreme activity, but if you want, you can! You can leave your grandfather behind!
But let’s not be prejudicial against anybody who wants to dive. Hovering underwater is an amazing sensation for everybody and perhaps even more so for people who are old and overweight. These people cannot easily go hiking up Mount Everest, but they can be free from the forces of gravity underwater. Everybody is welcome!
In fact, scuba diving is an activity that can be of interest to a wide variety of people. Why not invite your grandpa to go diving with you? Let’s be inclusive, not judgemental.
“I need to be a good swimmer” vs. “I don’t need to know how to swim”
At the same time as they started promoting scuba diving as being easy and for everybody, dive training agencies minimized the swimming requirements to the point that nowadays, it is frequent to see people coming to register for a scuba diving course with no swimming ability whatsoever.
Do I need to know how to swim to take scuba diving lessons?
You do not need to be a great swimmer to be good at diving because scuba diving is not a competition. But you need some basic swimming skills.
“Scuba is expensive!”
Everything is too expensive when it doesn’t provide you with more value than the money you’ve spent. But scuba diving is not more expensive than many other outdoor activities or hobbies.
Personally, I find downhill skiing and golfing both to be outrageously expensive because I do not like either of these activities. Meanwhile, spending time underwater, disconnected from my life on land, is priceless.
But if you are thinking about taking scuba lessons to get your open water diver certification, I must tell you right up front that looking for a bargain basement deal is often not the way to go scuba diving. Generally speaking, you want to spend more on training than the cheap course you will see advertised everywhere, but you can spend wisely on dive gear while finding value in diving the right way at the right dive destination for you.
Your life is probably worth more than the $5 you can save on a piece of dive gear with a questionable history. But there are many widgets dive retailers will try to sell you that you don’t need. That is a good place to save money.
Otherwise, your dive gear’s sizing, comfort, and performance will significantly impact how much you enjoy scuba diving. It would be sad to see you drop out of scuba diving just because you saved $10 on a regulator that makes you feel like you have to suck air through a straw or $20 on a vest that didn’t fit you. In these two cases, you would have been better off spending nothing at all and forgetting about scuba diving since you will end up not diving anyway.
For more information, check “The Total Cost of a Scuba Diving Certification (like the PADI Open Water Diver Course).”
“Scuba divers use oxygen tanks.”
Journalists are pressured to publish as much content as possible and regularly bypass the fact-checking process — or they are simply lazy. Either way, we frequently end up with news pieces mentioning “oxygen tanks” used by scuba divers.
Let’s set the record straight.
We do not breathe oxygen when scuba diving. In fact, oxygen can become toxic at depth. But at an overview level, let’s simply clarify that the standard breathing gas for scuba divers is air with roughly 21% of oxygen or “enriched air” (nitrox), which has more than 21% of oxygen but remains far from pure oxygen.
For specialized diving activities, we may also dive with other breathing gas mixtures besides standard or enriched air, like trimix which is a mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium. However, that goes much beyond your entry-level scuba diving training. It is used in tech diving.
Otherwise, we do not use tanks, which are big vehicles used in wars. We dive with cylinders.
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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