: Nobody throws on a scuba tank and goes swimming with no

: Except for me!

: YEARS AGO, a friend asked me if I wanted to go scuba diving with
: him. I said, "sure!"
: He had diving outfits for himself and his wife. She didn't like
: diving.

: He told me, "Don't hold your breath." That was it! I
: trusted him.
: I was fine, had a great time, I didn't want to come out of the new
: world I just discovered.
: My friend got hypothermia. I had to haul him out and pour hot soup
: in him so his wife didn't murder me for keeping him out so long.

: That was my one and only dive.

: Last week, a friend who is a diver, tells me I was nuts to have
: done that! He said I could have ripped my lungs out!

: But that's how it goes when you don't know what the dangers are and
: you want to do something. You think, "It will be
: okay."

: Rob

LOL! I also tend to learn the hard way (read that 'the most exciting way'). My first dive came when a friend bought new gear and offered to let me use his old stuff. Mostly because he needed a dive buddy. The old gear came without a pressure gauge, a depth gauge and it didn't even have a BC. He was newly certified and explained the simple rules: Don't hold your breath and don't go up faster than your slowest bubbles. We jumped off a boat to look at the reef in Ft. Lauderdale. I found out later it was an 80' dive. New divers tend to use more air that experienced guys and I didn't know what was happening when I ran out of air at 80'. By the time I figured it out it was a pretty critical situation. Fortunately, as you surface the air expands and you get at least one more breath. The trick to survival is always the same: don't panic!

I had such a good time that I started classes the next week and in the 30 years since I have logged hundreds of hours under water and have gotten several advanced certifications. I know from my classes that those initial instructions my friend gave me were really the only things I needed to know as a new diver. The proper gear would have been a lot safer though.

As dangerous as that first dive was it was tame compared to the time my dive boat left while I was under water lobstering at the Seven Mile Bridge. I popped up out of air in an outgoing tide that was too fast to swim against and was drug out to sea.

If I'll bet most of the readers on this forum would think I should have gotten the Darwin Award a time or two but I have survived an exciting life with many fabulous first hand stories to tell. And most of them don't make me sound stupid (the way I tell them). :-)

Kyle T