In my previous two articles, I discussed the importance of building a comfort zone and improving the diver’s ability to anticipate problems. As divers’ skills continue to develop, they will venture into deeper water and perhaps more hazardous conditions. The more variables introduced into any given dive, the more likely it is that divers will encounter an unanticipated problem. Extended bottom time and deeper depths also increase these probabilities.

You see the program from time to time at DEMA and other trade events, and you can read about it in the pages of nearly every dive magazine anytime. It typically goes something like this: Picture a big tank display with an “infrared” bulb (producing visible spectrum light) shining on a test tube, filled with water or a gel-like substance, floating in ice water. The display “demonstrates” that the finely ground “unicorn horn,” or earth minerals embedded in the neoprene, “produces heat” in the presence of infrared, which supposedly simulates your body’s metabolism.

The impact of diver drop-out is very difficult thing to assess due to a lack of data. The findings discussed in the first article in this series only tracked divers who completed an open water diver course.

Diving is no doubt one of the safest of the adventure sports in terms of the occurrence rate of injury. Diving is also deadly. When we isolate incidents resulting in injury as compared to other sports, you are more likely to die from a serious diving injury than you are from most other injuries occurring in many other sports. The funny thing about statistics is that they are like a wetsuit: What they cover up can be just as interesting as what they reveal.