My partner and I are living in Bristol, UK. We will be travelling for 6 months-a year on a reasonably limited budget (In about a year’s time). Where would be the best place to start out? How long should we stay in the first place and at what qualification should/could we leave for another destination and to further our training? We are happy to just stay at a few destinations for the whole year – we would prefer to really get to grips with diving and the culture. We want to swim with sharks : )

Start at home. You live in the UK where BSAC training is available, which in my opinion is the best of the training agencies. Learning to dive there will prepare you for just about any conditions you are faced with on your trip, whilst learning in a warm water destination won’t. I’d at the very least, go as far as your BSAC advanced level at home before your trip. The sky is the limit after that and you’ll have a great foundation to continue your training to wards dive master and up to Instructor anywhere else on the planet with any other training agency, like Padi or Naui. Matter of fact, once you have your advanced, you can intern at a few shops, like some in Thailand offering this and earn your DM/ Instructor’s rate there.

i have the goggles,flippers and snorkel.how much would this be worth?

~$80

kinda like the fins for scuba diving, swimming, ect. i was wondering if they make some for hands.

paddles are the way to go. If you swim competivily ask your coach were to get them. If you go on usaswimming.com they might have some. The guy that we get our equiptment from is t&t swimming that is in middle Atlantic zone. I’m not sure if he could reliever. Keiffer has a swim catalog out. Just so you know paddles are harder and they build arm strength, not necissarly are u faster.

I am studying to be a marine biologist and I am going for my SCUBA certifications, but I need approximate pricing before i go so i can get my equipment. I will be living in Florida soon, so I intend to get a boat so when I am qualified I can go out on dives. I am looking for boats and equipments i can look for fish, coral reefs, marine wildlife in general, also I am interested in ship wrecks. So I need an approximate pricing, websites and the equipment, and types of boats. I want the best equipment.

Look to spend around 10 thousand on dive equipment if you want to be a marine biologist, boats and equipment tend to be specific to the type of diving you will be doing. I recommend that you finish getting certified prior to purchasing very much equipment. Any good dive shop will allow you to test out your equipment prior to purchasing, everyone has their own personal preferences and until you become relaxed and comfortable in the water you probably wont have any idea about what you like or it will change as you learn. As for boats, there are many types to choose from, most of which will depend on the conditions you expect to work in and how physically able you are to climb into them from the water, look at other people in your profession and glean tips from them as far as deck space for equipment, power and style. You can also make or obtain modifications to any boat to better suit the work you will be performing. Either way you should expect to spend a lot of money, and last time I checked marine biologists don’t get paid very much and they usually work with a university which already has that sort of equipment or off of grants.

I know its a weird question 😛
Im doing a story for English and there is a father that dies whilst scuba diving with his daughter. They are swimming around a shipwreck from the sixties.
I dont really know much about scuba diving so i was just wondering if anyone has any ideas of how he could die?

Thanks heaps = D
I’d like a sort of out there-ish death. Something thats not normal but griping and sad.

A.G.E.- Arterial Gas Embolisms are horrible. The short version is that you lung pops and an air bubble gets in your blood and goes to your brain or heart and bam you are dead. This is why very SCUBA instructor will tell you to never hold your breath will diving, what they don’t tell you is that you are in more danger of this happening in the pool during your class then diving down to 40 feet for your open water dives. How it works is that as you go down to 5? in a pool (at five feet most people can just stand up to get to the surface), you panic and stand up, automatically holding your breath(because that is what you do underwater) and pop your dead.

DCS- Decompression Sickness aka The Bends is no joke. Basically as you dive your body becomes saturated with nitrogen bubbles(or whatever inert gas you are breathing) when you start to surface those bubble expand. Depending where they expand they can break bones or destroy your brain. Preventing this is as simple as coming up slowly and following the no decompression dive tables. Just to give you an idea of how much this can suck and how varied the damage can be I had two dive instructors at the college of Oceaneering who had had decompression sickness. Once of them had his back broken and one had both of his hips snapped. Sounds fun dosen’t it. If you get bubbles in the wrong place (your brain) it can tear through that soft gray stuff leading to brain death.

Animal Stings- This one is a personal favorite of mine. It all goes back to not touching the animals. If Steve Irwin taught us anything it is that animals get pissy if you mess with them. So don’t mess with them and you’ll be fine. Also keep in mind that the really poisonous animals are really little. The best ones are rock fish, because they look like a rock and will kill you super fast and you won’t even know what you did.

Differential Pressure or Delta P- This is my favorite, in fact it by far one of the scariest things I have seen. Basically these happen when the pressure between the water(where you are) and the pipe(or whatever0 is so different that you get sucked in breaking all of your bones and killing you. Typically this isn’t something that a normal diver needs to worry about but it is just so spectacular that it couldn’t be left off the list. There is even a video, though if you like crabs you will be sad. This is a video taken in 6000 feet of water. An undersea robot is sawing a 3mm wide slit (1/10th of an inch … remember that width) in a pipeline. The pressure inside the pipeline is 0 psi, while the pressure outside is 2700 psi, or 1.3 tons per square inch. Then a crab comes along….