Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a special time of year, especially for midwestern scuba divers who make the annual plunge into our local lakes as the water temperatures creep closer and closer to freezing. 

I am thankful for the community that my local diving builds. The friends you make along the way, the die-hards, the cold water divers. 

Before the Thanksgiving Day dive, there is a lot of understandable procrastination. Although everyone is there for the dive, nobody really wants to jump right in. It’s not like a charity polar plunge where you’re in and out in less than a minute, the veterans all know that in 20 minutes we will all be saying to ourselves, “what am a I doing here?” 
The new divers are buzzing with excitement and often say, “it wasn’t as c-c-cold as I thought is was going to be,” as they try to play off the fact that their near hypothermic body temps are making them delusional. 
If you’ve done this dive more than 5 times or so you are probably talking to the crew and saying with a boisterous humor, “you know, we could just head over to the pub and say we did it… no one would know.” And with a laugh and a chuckle from everyone around, you realize you better get your gear on because once again nobody is taking you up on your offer. 
I am thankful for these times with real people. Humans sharing and engaging in an activity that most people reserve for the television, maybe on shark week but other than that, scuba diving is forever a dream. And cold water diving, probably a nightmare. 

As I think of things to be thankful for this year, I want to share 3 specifically for my diving friends. 3 things I learned along my underwater journey that have made diving so much more enjoyable for me. I share these with you in hopes of you finding more things to be thankful for on your days under the sea. 

Teammates 
Underwater we are all taught to dive with a buddy but rarely are we guided through the process of building a teammate. 
That is the hard part. But like all difficult endeavors, they are the most rewarding. 
If you are looking to get more fun and enjoyment out of your diving, then building a team that you dive with is a sure way to accomplish this. Divers who enter the water on the same page, never get separated, and are always where they are supposed to be is not a thing of fiction or a happening that occurs rarely by chance. It is the product of good training with a focus on a team that is unified in thinking, process, and goals. 
Clear communication is routine and regular for a teammate, whereas confusion and frustration is the normal feeling with just having a dive buddy. 
To those divers who worked tirelessly with me over the years. Investing in education, equipment and experiences so that we can orchestrate the wonderful dives we are doing today, I am very thankful. 

Buoyancy 
When I first became an Open Water Scuba Instructor in the late 90’s, I was in my early 20’s and teaching with a bunch of veteran instructors at the shop who had been at it for a few decades already. I was the new kid and when I tried to teach neutral buoyancy as an art I was mocked and laughed at. 
“You can’t teach neutral buoyancy,” the head instructor used to scoff at me, “they just have to learn it themselves, over time.”
I had another friend, who I worked with for a few years that moved to the Cayman Islands and was teaching down there. He used to tell me about cruising down the reef and getting neutrally buoyant and upside down, and with using just his breath he’d exhale and drop his head down in an opening in the reef to take a look and then inhale and rise back up. I was fascinated and made this a major part of my teaching despite the pushback I received from the rest of the instructors. 
In 2009, I was invited to be one of 10 original founding instructors for Unified Team Diving. UTD Scuba Diving would become the first agency to offer an entire training program from recreational to technical and cave that was taught 100% neutrally buoyant. 
I am very thankful that I ran into the right divers over the years. In the early 2000’s I learned the DIR style of diving from some of its early pioneering instructors and it would change the way I dive and teach ever since. DIR was the only place you heard about buoyancy, balance, and trim back in those days. I am thankful for some of those instructors for taking me under their “backplate and wings.”

Propulsion
I started diving in 1989 as a 15 year old kid. My first fins were a lightweight but rather stiff and were vented fins from TUSA. All I really cared about was that they were red! 
I later switched to the Mares Plana Avanti’s, it was the Instructor choice at the shop. A few of the older guys dived the Power Plana Graphite but those were out of production and getting hard to find. 
Over the years I would experiment with all kinds of evolving technology in fin designs. Some of them pretty wild. 
The Blades from U.S. Divers, Turboflex and Integra from Dacor, Reeflex from Wenoka that had different stiffening bands you could insert, bungee powered turbo booster fins from Aqua Lung, the original split fin from Apollo, the folding transformer fin from Omega, pivoting hinged blades, long bladed fins, rubber Power and Rocket Fins. For years I used the Mares Quattro, then Jets and Hollis fins, so many different styles.
The materials were another piece of the puzzle, heavy rubber vs lightweight plastic, multiple materials, flexing membranes, carbon fiber, EVA… so many different materials. 
The scuba world is full of engineering and technological innovations to keep you excited with the newest style of underwater propulsion. These new designs will help you swim faster, swim easier, give you more power, reduce the strain on your legs or knees or whatever, they might float, maybe sink, have vents for water flow, splits for propeller effects, so many different gadgets. 
I am so thankful that I learned about underwater propulsion and that swimming is all about technique rather than a need for innovative technology. It is a simple matter of physics, the same laws we learned in grade school from Sir Issac Newton. The only way you swim forward is if you can push the water in the opposite direction. Any thrust or movement of water that doesn’t deliver water exactly where you need it to go to get the desired result is a waste of effort and energy. Energy that leads to CO2 production and buildup. 
Even the most technologically advanced fin will perform terribly if the diver does not have the proper technique to put the water where it needs to go. 
Learning how to properly swim underwater and have a toolbox of different kicking styles to deliver forward thrust, backwards thrust, turns, yawls, 90’s, 180’s, 360’s, big powerful kicks, easy efficient kicks, small delicate kicks… all of these finesse techniques are far more valuable than the most perfectly designed “Golden Magic Fin.”
I am thankful for learning that swimming is about technique and not technology. 

I hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday with friends and family, and maybe some dive buddies too. Please share this with your buddies and send me a message too. Let me know what things you’ve learned along the way that has made your diving better. The things you are thankful for this diving year.