WET & WILD : She’s Feeling Buoyant After Her First Scuba Diving Lesson

Lynn decided that scuba diving was for her at the moment her face broke through the glassy surface of the water to experience submarine freedom for the very first time.

Eyes big, she stared into the aqua space--first left, then right--breathing hard from her regulator as if her future depended on it.

It didn’t matter that she was standing in the shallow end of a swimming pool with her face in the water. What impressed her, she said later, was that for the first time in her life she was breathing underwater without doing it through a snorkel.

We had come to the dive shop of the Sports Chalet in Huntington Beach where, like at most other dive shops in Orange County, salespeople and dive instructors are eager to interest would-be customers in scuba diving. So for absolutely nothing they’ll show you a videotape on diving, demonstrate the use of scuba gear and supply all the equipment and know-how for a dive in their pool. Other shops offer similar experiences; some will, for a price, even take you into the ocean.

These are not certification courses, to be sure; those would involve several weeks of classroom, pool and ocean work resulting in a legal certification to dive. But they give you enough of a taste of the sport to decide whether you want to pursue it. And I’d been trying to get Lynn into scuba for years.

We arrived at the shop late on a Friday afternoon. To make the appointment, I’d called the shop, and we had been assigned our own personal instructor, Samuel Dean Miller IV. Miller--who has been diving since age 3--quickly ushered us into a back room to watch a video that had me salivating within minutes.

Ahhh, the clear crystalline waters of Hawaii. Ohhh, the beautiful coral reefs of Florida and the Caribbean.

Before you slide into those waters, though, you’ve got to start closer to home. So we soon found ourselves splashing the blue water with our feet as we sat on the deck of the heated pool.

I had brought all my own gear; for Lynn, everything was provided, including mask, fins, snorkel, tank, buoyancy compensator, regulator and weight belt.

Gingerly teaching her how to clear her mask and inhale from her regulator, Miller imparted the cardinal rule of diving: Don’t, under any circumstances, ever hold your breath while on scuba. The result could be a ruptured lung.

He taught her a few other things as well: If you want to go down, pull the cord on your buoyancy compensator vest to empty it of air. To go up, press the button on your chest that will fill the vest with air from your tank. And should your regulator get flooded, he said, press the purge valve at its center to blow out the water and fill it once again with air.

When you’re in the ocean, of course, you also have to pay close attention to the gauges at your side that tell you such things as the air pressure remaining in your tank, how deep you are and how long you’ve been down.

A pool, though, is more relaxing; you can just kick back and flow with the pleasant sensations of underwater freedom.

That’s what Lynn tried to do as she stood on the bottom with water up to her chest, looking around while taking her first tentative underwater breaths as I blew bubbles beneath her.

There were a few moments of uncertainty, to be sure. Entering water for the first time wearing 40 pounds of alien gear, after all, can be disconcerting. “You didn’t tell me you have to breathe through your mouth,” she said later. But then came that moment when, suddenly feeling comfortable for the first time, Lynn smiled and saw a whole new future stretching out before her.

She beamed proudly. She still lay floating near the surface, unable just yet to control her buoyancy enough to sink very deep. But I could tell from her expression that she’d already caught the bug.

Later when Miller announced that it was time to go, Lynn objected. “I wanted to stay a little longer,” she told me afterward. “I could have gotten to the bottom.”

But I already know that she will.

Last weekend, in fact, the subject of diving came up once again. “Let’s stop at the shop and check on classes,” Lynn suggested.

She starts her certification course next week. To arrange for your own pre-certification underwater pool experience, call the Sports Chalet dive shop at (714) 848-0988.