Judging by the number of dive shops in the eastern North Shore area where I live, I would guess there are about as many Long Island dive shops as there are bait and tackle shops. Almost all of them offer diving courses that lead to the certification required to do things like rent equipment, go on trips on dive boats, and get tanks filled. The most common entry-level course leads to a PADI Open Water certification. PADI is the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, the world's largest diver training organization. I was first certified to dive in 1983. When my son Michael was about 10 years old, he attended a "Bubblemaker"party with his Boy Scout troop at the Hampton Dive Center in Riverhead (www.hamptondive.com). Participants in Bubblemaker parties spend about 30 minutes in the classroom learning the basic rules of diving. They are then fitted with scuba equipment and spend time in the onsite pool playing games under the supervision of dive instructors. The minimum age for the parties is 8. Michael had already done some snorkeling with me in the Sound prior to this, and the party sparked his interest in moving on to diving with scuba equipment. We decided to wait until he was a little older. Early last fall at age 12, after watching him keep up with my free-diving pace and having him point out all of the fluke I was missing, we decided the following winter would be a great time for him go through the certification process. I tagged along, going through all of the training, tests, and dives with the rest of the class. We chose Port Diver in Port Jefferson (www.portdiver.com). Their location and class schedules were convenient for us, and it was where I received my initial certification in '83. Our class met on Tuesday and Thursday nights of the first week for two hours in the classroom each night. The following Tuesday and Thursday had us in the classroom for two hours each night, and then in a nearby pool for two hours. These four sessions would represent the first part of the course. The final part leading to certification required four open water dives that would have to wait until the local waters warmed up in the spring. Costs for diver certification courses vary from shop to shop. At the time we signed up, Port Diver's class cost $179, and each student was required to purchase a $50 PADI "Crew Pack" that consisted of the course manual, logbook, and Recreational Dive Planner (RDP). The RDP is used to calculate allowable depth and time limits for dives. It cost $35 to rent the videos that went along with the course, but you got that back at the end of the course if you chose to return them. Some students opt to keep them. There was also a $25 fee to cover the PADI certification. All equipment was included for the pool dives. A student could pay a one-time fee of $100 to rent all of the necessary gear for the open water dives, if he or she didn't already own equipment. We had homework before we ever set foot in the classroom. We had to read three chapters in the manual and watch the corresponding modules on the video. This is serious stuff, and it's not something to be skimmed and glossed over. There's a 50-question final exam at the end of the classroom sessions that requires a score of 75% for passage. Everyone sighed when they heard that seemingly high required score, but our instructor, shop owner Greg Sorger, had a great comeback. "If you're 50 feet down and something goes wrong, you or your buddy knowing only 70% of what you're supposed to might not be good enough!" The good news is, although there is a fair amount of information to be mastered, most of it is straightforward, and common sense helps with a lot of it. Also, if you do what you're supposed to - read the manual and watch the assigned videos before each class, you'll actually get the material three times. What you read in the manual is reinforced in the videos and then reiterated with some insights in the classroom. Quizzes taken along the way also help prepare the student for the final. As an example of something important you would learn in the classroom, what do you think would happen if you inflated a balloon 33 feet down and let it go to the surface? Because of the difference in pressure between 33 feet and the surface, the volume of air in the balloon would double, and the balloon would likely burst. Now what do you think might happen to your lungs if you took a breath at 33 feet and ascended to the surface while holding your breath? Like the bursting balloon, you would suffer a serious lung expansion injury, and possibly death. One of the main rules of scuba diving is to always breath normally and never hold your breath. The pool sessions were very well supervised. The class limit was 12 people. When it was time for the pool exercises, trained dive masters assisted our instructor so that the student-teacher ratio was about 4:1. We learned how to do things like regulate buoyancy, recover from a mask being knocked off, enter the water from the side of a boat in full gear, and handle some equipment malfunctions, such as a stuck free-flowing regulator. I paid special attention to the free-flowing regulator exercise, which simulates a regulator stuck in the open position with air bubbling out under pressure. During the final exam, which we took just before the last pool session, I chuckled when I came upon the regulator free-flow question and one of the answers was to take the regulator out of your mouth and sip air from the bubbles going by. It sounded like a pretty silly thing to do underwater, and I chose a more reasonable sounding answer. Had I done my homework better, I would have known that the air-sipping response was the correct one. As I did it in the pool, I realized it was a surprisingly easy thing to do. Although I passed the final exam with a score of 94 (Michael had a 92), that would be a pretty serious piece of information to be missing should my regulator ever get stuck in a free-flow. Regulator malfunctions are rare, but they are more likely to free-flow than to shut air off completely. When the Sound warmed up enough for diving, it was time for us to make the required open water dives. All of our dives were made at Cedar Beach in Mt. Sinai. On the days we dove, the Sound was calm, so all of our diving was done there. Had there been a strong onshore wind to rile the Sound, we would have made the dives on the other side of the parking lot in the calm waters of Mt. Sinai Harbor. Having this option almost guaranteed that a class wouldn't need to be cancelled because water conditions were bad. As with the pool dives, dive masters assisted our instructor so that the student-teacher ratio was about 4:1. The level of supervision was even greater than this because Greg took us out in pairs to perform the required exercises. One of the exercises was a "Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent". This is something you might do if you lost your air supply at less than 30 feet and your buddy wasn't close enough to help you out. In this case, you would head for the surface, exhaling the whole time while making an aaaahhhh sound into your regulator. It's an interesting exercise because you start with air in your lungs, exhale all the way to the surface, and still have air when you get there. That's because, as mentioned earlier, the volume of air in your lungs will expand as you ascend. |
Before leaving the shop, I got our tanks filled. It was already too late in the day to do our own dive, so we pinpointed low slack water on the Sound side of the North Fork for about 3 p.m. the next day. We'd launch the boat at 1:30 p.m., arrive at the boulder field I had in mind by 1:45 p.m., drop a couple dive flags when the fishfinder looked interesting, and plan to be in the water by 2:15 p.m. With a tank of air lasting about 80 minutes in the 20-foot range we planned to dive, we would have about 40 minutes on each side of slack current. This type of planning was not taught in the course, because it is specific to a given area. What was stressed in the course was to carefully plan your dive, and that we did. As my son's first scuba diving adventure, I'd be happy for him to just see some blackfish and fluke under the more leisurely pace afforded by an air supply, as opposed to what he was used while holding his breath while free-diving. What I hoped for most was to find lobsters. Prior to about the mid-90s, I rarely had trouble getting the 6-lobster limit allowed by the recreational permit issued by the DEC, even when free-diving from the beach. The past 10 years was a different story, in which coming home with a single lobster was a novelty. The lobstering deteriorated to the point that I had only done some occasional free-diving over the last couple years, and I was hoping that by pushing a little deeper with the scuba equipment to some rocks I couldn't reach free-diving, we might come across a couple of the tasty crustaceans. We started the dive from the beach. As soon as we reached shoulder-depth water, we dropped to the bottom, exchanged OK signs, and used my compass to head north. As we moved along, spider and hermit crabs scuttled along the bottom. I kept my eyes open for holes at the edges of rocks where lobsters might hide. The larger rocks that we passed were watched over by tiny bergalls, and the occasional small blackfish or sea bass. A lightning fast puff of sand from an otherwise uninteresting patch of bottom told us we had just spooked a fluke. To someone who dives in the Caribbean, or even Long Island's South Shore ocean waters, the visibility on the North Shore might be downright unacceptable. But for us, it was all that we knew, and the 8 or 10 feet that we could see on this dive was just fine. As Mike put it later, "I kind of like not knowing what we're coming up on". Fine by me. While I'm on a constant hunt for shadows on these dives, because they're the first things you see when you approach boulders, the perfectly round object ahead had my attention. Lobsters are strange creatures. They can have massive boulders and irregular piles of rocks to hide under, but they have an affinity for tires - and the bigger the tire the better. This one was definitely the size of a truck tire, and there was sand piled up in the middle. In a few more kicks, an antenna and claw were clearly visible. There's a problem with lobsters you find in the wild - they don't have rubber bands on their claws the way they do in the seafood store. I wear rubber electrician's gloves to do the grabbing. I've never had worse than a small bruise or cut from an encounter, but the larger ones can do some hurting, and this one was a prize. First I looked at Mike, pointed at my eyes, then pointed at the inside edge of the tire to make sure he saw what I did. From the look on his face, I knew he was looking at his first underwater lobster. I then handed him my mesh bag and studied the situation. When a lobster is in a tire, it often has the entire inside cavity to go around in circles. The good thing is, that's all it can do, as opposed to a deep hole under a rock that it can escape into. This one was going in the pot; it was just a matter of doing it as painlessly (for me) as possible. With a quick grab I got a hold of it at the base of its claws and the front of its head. I then positioned it so I could get my other hand over its back and get a firm enough grip to drag it out. As I did, it clamped onto my arm, but couldn't do any damage through the neoprene wetsuit. Mike opened up the bag, I pushed the lobster in backwards with some force, and we had our prize. It would later weigh 3 pounds, 2 ounces. In my lifetime, I'm sure I've caught more 40-pound surf bass than 3-pound lobsters, so this was a real trophy! With the dive already a huge success, we continued to explore. We saw more blackfish, sea bass, and fluke, and near the end of the dive, we put another nice lobster in the bag. Depending on what you fish for, diving can help up your score. I don't find this true for stripers, at least not in the Sound. I have rarely seen them in the Sound while free or scuba diving. When I have seen them, they've been on the outer edge of my field of visibility. They apparently keep their distance. Fluke are often pretty hard to spot, and even when I dive areas where I catch them, I don't see very many. If you happen upon a good sea bass spot, you're in luck. They border on friendly, and will often swim over to check you out if you kneel still on the bottom. Diving is an excellent way to find good blackfish spots. You might check out a dozen nice boulders on a diving trip and all the blackfish will be on the same rock, even though it doesn't look any different than the others. What's valuable is that the preference of the blackfish doesn't seem to change. Every time you dive an area, the same rock will hold most of the fish. My two largest surf-caught blackfish, 13 and 15 pounds, were both caught with pinpoint casts to spots that I had previously dived. While going through the training, it became apparent to me that most of the people in the class had little interest in diving locally. It's generally thought of as too cold and with less than optimal visibility. Long Island may not be the Caribbean, but there's still plenty to see beneath its waters. Whether you're interested in lobsters, spear fishing, or just getting a look beneath some of the waters you fish, a scuba certification is satisfying to earn, and a valuable thing to have. |
