Tymon Burghy

When I was in Boy Scouts, I was fortunate enough to take part in an experience in a camp pool to put on some heavy equipment and try breathing underwater. Now normally, you would say I was crazy for trying to breathe underwater, but you already say the photo above and have made the connection. It was in the pool at a scout camp called Camp Friedlander that I took my first breath underwater, unlocking my interest in scuba diving.

Fast forward a good few years, and I never got scuba certified. Infact, I had only scuba dived one other time at the local camp another summer. It had been nearly six years since I had even considered scuba diving. A dive shop had moved near to where I was working and I passed when I went to work. Every now and then thinking to myself that I should stop in and see how much a certification was. One day after work, I ventured over and stopped in. I chatted with the woman at the front desk for a bit and grabbed a paper talking about the certification. Then I simply put it out of my mind. It wasn’t until I was approaching my thesis for my final year of classes that I thought about scuba diving again. I planned to find an area of interest that I could do some design around and improve the area. I threw out a wide variety of ideas from airline travel (if you have read some of my other posts or have travelled int the last 22 years, you could see some things that need improved) to camping. As I went through some of the ideas, I jotted down scuba diving. I was stuck with no direction for my thesis. I had a call with my department head over the summer before my final year, and I told him that I didn’t have a direction. We talked over the areas of interest, many of which, I had a lot of experience in, which could be good, but could also bring in biases to my research. In going through my list of areas, I mentioned scuba diving as an interest but that I didn’t know much about it. My department head noted it and said that scuba diving had potential, but I had a lot to learn and a lot of research do to for it.

I thought about the idea of scuba diving for my thesis for a good bit and mid-summer, I stopped thinking about it and decided that I would make the direction for my thesis scuba diving. My plan to tackle the amount of research I needed was to do what I had wanted to do since I was a young Boy Scout, and get my open water certification. On my lunch break at work, I called the dive shop and learned more about the certification. I bought the online training section and started learning that day after work. A few days later I called the dive shop again and told them I wanted to do the in-person training dives and got the dates. I spent the next few weeks working on the online learning and attending training dives in the evenings after work.

The final training dives came on a chilly August morning. We met at the dive shop in the early morning and after setting up our equipment, we ran through some classroom work and headed to the local quarry, North Point. We donned our gear and wetsuits and hit the water. Up to this point, all of the water I had been in was chlorinated and contained by four walls and you could see all four walls. Jumping into the quarry, I was greated by a change of environment, cold green water filled my wetsuit and when my head submerged, I saw nothing. My field of vision was filled with green. A beautiful gradient of green, starting lighter, and getting darker. I surfaced, gave the all clear sign and swam further out. Once everyone was in the water, we began our check dives, descending to a platform about 7m down and checking that we knew everything we needed to know in order to be successful divers. We then spent a dive swimming around the quarry, working on navigation, buoyancy control, and overall dive safety.

The next day, we repeated the morning, figuring out how to attempt to navigate when you can’t see anything, and going over all of the paperwork we needed while we were still dry. We hit the water again, and went over our skills, running through emergency scenarios and ensuring that all of the students knew what to do in those situations. We conducted our final dive with the students planning what to do. Our objective was to dive to a sunken houseboat. We were given coordinates to find the boat from another location underwater, and once we descended, we were underway to the first point. We arrived, set our compasses to the coordiantes we were given, and my buddy and I started swimming. We swam, and swam, and continued swimming, until we hit a patch of seagrass (or whatever you would call the grass in a quarry) I turned to my buddy and I saw the look of confusion in his eyes through his mask. I signalled to ascend and we made our way to the surface. “I think we missed it” I started with. “Yeah,” he said, “also, where is the rest of the group?” In the low-vis water, we had lost the rest of the group. I then scanned the surface of the water, and saw three trails of bubbles breaking the surface. We swam to the bubbles, and descended. We regrouped with the other two students and one instructor and headed back in the direction they were headed. We ended the dive and while we were taking our gear off, one of the other students said, “Did you guys end up finding the boat?” I looked at my buddy and said “Nope, did you?” The other student chuckled and replied, “yeah, the instructor who told you the bearing was off by like ten degrees, we just followed the other instructor. I don’t even know the real bearing.” The other instructor nodded and said “sorry about that, you headed off and we lost sight of you before I could stop you.” Although it was mildly frustrating, I’m glad that our compass wasn’t the problem. And even though I haven’t seen the boat yet, I am going to try to find it next time I am at the quarry, with the right bearings.

A storm had rolled in as we were exiting the water, the divers scrambled to get out before there was lightning, and when there was, we sent the remaining divers back down underwater. Although this might sound dangerous, it’s not. Lightning doesn’t travel though the water, it travels on top of the water. It was more dangerous to have them swim back to the dock and have them get out. After a few minutes of a brilliant lightning show, the other divers got out and started getting their gear off. We dried off and headed back to the dive shop. At the dive shop, we were all told that we had passed and in a makeshift ceremony, we were given temporary certifications while our cards came in the mail. I was officially a scuba diver.

When school started back up a few weeks later, I was more prepared than ever to tackle my thesis and find a way to improve the diving experience. Nearly six weeks since my call with my department head, I was on the path towards a defined thesis and I was a certified scuba diver armed with training and experience to tackle the thesis.