A friend of mine recently sent me a copy of the diving logbook he used when he did his first diver training with what was then the Malayan Sub Aqua Club. As my friend guessed, this is the same logbook I was given when I signed up for my first dive course. My original logbook is long gone, and seeing this brought back a flood of long-lost memories. I thought you might be entertained by a quick rundown of what we had to go through and the skills we needed to master to become sport divers in those days.

Let’s first turn back the clock to 1981…

Not so long ago, diver training agencies, equipment manufacturers and resorts were lamenting the fact that the activity was much less popular than it used to be. There was a great deal of pessimism over the future of sport diving as a whole. The early adopters were ageing, divers were dropping out, young people were not interested in an activity their parents and grandparents did, working people could not afford it and the ocean environment was deteriorating. If someone was interested in marine life, they did not even need to get wet. They could watch videos on their computers instead.

The genesis of this story was a friend asking me if I had ever been frightened on a technical dive. My answer was, “Not at the time.” There have been a few occasions when fear only arose after the dive—after I reviewed what had happened and realised how differently things could have turned out. That’s when the cold sweat formed on my forehead, a chill ran down the back of my neck, my face began to flush, and I got that familiar “uh-oh” sensation in the pit of my stomach.

A friend recently sent me a detailed account of the Red Sea dive trip he joined in 2022. Lots of people send in “it happened to me” stories. They have read my books and know I like tales like this. I dissect them, feast on them, and then regurgitate them as magazine articles or newsletter anecdotes with the idea that divers might learn something from them.

Some reports tell the story of a problem-free fortnight in paradise, extolling the virtues of a destination or dive operator. Others talk about a dive that went wrong or a dive centre that did not live up to expectations. 

It was the second dive of a long-anticipated trip, and the site was Mioskon Island in Indonesia’s Dampier Strait—one of the crown jewels of the area known as Raja Ampat or Four Kings. This is where new arrivals often get their first glimpse of the vast volume and variety of life in the waters of this protected patch of northwest Papua. 

At the Taipei Dive Resort and Travel (DRT) Show earlier this year, I walked around the hall, chatting with old friends, making new friends and checking out the booths. I like dive shows, but, for obvious reasons, this was the first I had attended in over three years.

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.

There are more people doing technical dives than ever before and there are more professional dive operations catering to technical divers. Far from being an outlier, as it was in the early days, technical diving is now just another branch of the mainstream scuba diving world.

However, despite these developments, divers are still coming to harm on technical dives in the same way they did a generation ago.

As in so many other fields of human experience, familiarity breeds complacency and this leads to overconfidence, negligence and carelessness.

Taking a giant stride off the back on the boat, the chill of the water snapped me out of my early-morning haze. Below me, the sharks were already there; at least ten were circling below the boat. The food wasn’t even in the water yet, but the sharks knew the drill: The boat shows up, divers jump in, and eventually, they get a snack.