The greatest danger in scuba diving? You may be surprised!

I learned to scuba dive about 20 years ago.  I was certified by NAUI (the National Association of Underwater Instructors) in Chicago, Illinois, and did my check-out dive in a quarry in Wisconsin.  It was dreary and raining.  The water was cold and the scenery sorely lacking:  we dove down to the top of an abandoned school bus!   I did just fine as long as I had air; strap a tank on me and I can dive for hours.

But take away the air, and make me go underwater, and I want to surface immediately.  It was a huge accomplishment for me to complete my surface dive (where you go fairly deep with no air, just a snorkel, then surface and clear out your snorkel to continue breathing on the surface) although I bit through at least one snorkel before I was through! I blamed it on the cold but the truth is that I was very tense.

I did a fair amount of diving before I had children and hung up my fins.  I dove the Blue Hole, going down 120 feet and getting “narced” (nitrogen narcosis, where you feel “drunk” underwater). I did open water diving with hammerhead sharks off CoCos Island.

My buddy and I were swept away in a current in the middle of the ocean, but so was the dive master and the rest of the dive team, so the boat followed us and we were just fine.   I dove with sea turtles, manta rays, eels, and sea horses.  I’ve done night diving, which was surprisingly noisy as the fish nipped the coral as they fed.  I loved scuba diving.  It was a magical, liberating, beautiful experience. But I never forgot how dangerous it was and that it could kill you if you weren’t careful and aware.

I tend to be fairly risk averse so I did a lot of nerdy research as I prepared for my first real diving trip.  I wanted to know all I could about how to avoid a scuba diving accident.   I learned something that I thought others might find very interesting:  that diving as a threesome is the single most dangerous thing you can do when scuba diving!    More dangerous than cave diving, ice diving, open water diving, or diving alone!  (If my memory serves me right, this result is based on Canadian data on scuba diving accidents, injuries, and deaths. )

It seems hard to believe at first but I think I’ve got it figured out. For one, it happens fairly often.  I’ve seen it on many diving trips: someone comes alone or their buddy can’t dive, so they join up with a buddy team.  Dive instructors suggest that people join up in threes rather than dive alone.  Or the dive instructor joins a pair.

Two, I think people feel safer in a bigger group.  Three, I think that when you are diving alone, or cave or ice diving, you are very aware of the risks and take extra precautions to avoid the dangers.  But diving in threes doesn’t “seem” risky, so everyone relaxes.  And people tend not to clearly lay out ahead of time who is watching whom at the bottom of the ocean where seconds can make the difference between life and death. And that is likely where the danger lives:  with a buddy system, there is no question about who is responsible for whom.  I am watching out for my buddy, and he is watching out for me.  Period. But when diving in threes, the pairing gets muddled.  Are you watching out for two people?  Are they watching out for you, or for each other?  And inevitably someone gets overlooked.  And accidents happen.

So, if you ever take up scuba diving, have a blast! But don’t ever dive in threes!

by Sherry Jarrell