They did talk about one guy that had freaked and started sucking water.
They were impressed with the concern for safety shown . . . because the
guides made him get back on the boat right away.  LOL

He's not a DM?

Oh... Scott said HAVE... not GET.

 --- Rich
 http://richlockyer.tripod.com/

Do ya think so?

OK, this is totally unrelated to the current thread, but I couldn't be
bothered to go and find a thread it works with.

In any event, by complete fluke, this website came up while I searching for
something benign and totally unrelated to what came up.  It's weird and cool
. . .

http://www.bushflash.com/thanks.html

If you hang out here on rec.scuba, you are bound to get into a pissing
match.  Nature of the beast.  ;^)

Fortunately?

There ya go.

Well, for me, I was a bit like you.  I'd been thinking of it for years but
didn't get around to taking any lessons.

I went on a vacation to Mexico. While there, we went on a tour that included
a snorkel at Shel Ha.  I quickly realized that it just wasn't enough for me.
Within days of my return home, I signed up for lessons.  It was one of the
best things I've ever done in my life.

For years prior, I was really into snow skiing.  I went every weekend as
soon as the season started and easily half of my annual vacations were spent
skiing. Eventually, I took up sailboarding too.  Once I got into that, I was
hooked.

Since I've taken up diving, as much fun as my other activities were, I'm no
longer interested in skiing or sailboarding.

Well, your choice.

You will certainly get "views" here and mine should be quite clear.  Take a
full course, you will be better able to decide if diving is right for you.
What you are planning might be enough to give you a clue, but if it doesn't
go well, you'll never know for sure if diving was the right choice for you.

He's gone.

An open water class doesn't cost that much more than the intro class.

IIRC, my resort course, 2 dives, in Grand Cayman was about $120.
My OW class was $150, including equipment rental.

Time was really the only investment.

 --- Rich
 http://richlockyer.tripod.com/

You won't know if you don't just dive in, literally.  Ignore the BS that
flies around this place and go enjoy your intro dive -- they're pretty safe.
If the bug bites you, then get into a certification program, keep an open
mind, read, learn, and ask questions -- don't take everything you're told as
gospel.  Above all, dive, dive, dive.  Every dive is (should be) a learning
experience.  Enjoy yourself.

If you think you're interested then you almost certainly will be interested when you
get around to it. I suppose you could go diving and decide you don't like it, but the
more likely problem would be having issues with breathing while underwater rather
than thinking diving is boring. You might be able to find out if you have any
problems with the breathing underwater part of it for free at a dive shop that offers
an introductory pool session. Assuming everything goes well, it would probably be
completely safe to spend the few hundred bucks that is the upper limit for a basic OW
course and mask, fins and snorkel.

My humble opinion is that resort courses are usually quite safe, but I'm sure there
are rare exceptions. Arguably, the riskiest part of a resort course will be a
too-rapid ascent. Sure, you might just out and out drown, but while almost nobody
drowns on a resort course, almost everybody has poor buoyancy control. In nice warm
tropical water, where you don't have a wetsuit, poor buoyancy probably means that you
have a bit of trouble maintaining a consistent depth and swim with a bit of an up or
down angle to maintain your depth. In the cold waters off of California, OTOH, you'll
be wearing a nice, fat neoprene wetsuit, which will increase the buoyancy issues. At
the surface it will take perhaps 15 pounds of lead to sink the suit (not counting
what it takes to sink you), but at 40 feet the suit will compress, making you several
pounds heavy. To overcome the heavyness (negative buoyancy) you'll have to put some
air in the BC, and each time you ascend or descend a bit that air, and the bubbles in
the neoprene, will expand or contract, changing your buoyancy. When you ascend to the
surface that expanding air can potentially result in a runaway ascent, making a cold
water resort course more likely to be dangerous than a warm water one. If that
happens, the air that's inside you will also expand, and can potentially cause any of
several unpleasant things to happen. That scenario is one of the reasons that
instructors tend to overweight students. They'd rather have you work a bit to not
sink as an alternative to a rapid ascent. As long as you vent most of the air before
ascending, and stay a bit heavy, it's hard to get out of control, though you'll
probably still pop up the last few feet a bit fast. As was said earlier, keep
breathing so any expanding air simply goes out your mouth.

You'd almost certainly be safer taking a real OW course first, but the risks on the
resort course are really quite small.

Am I the newbie who doesn't know how to learn?  If so, WTF are you
smoking!  If not, never mind.

JS