Date: 5.28.2001
Should you teach your kids to scuba dive? Not if you can go bowling instead.
As a working mom, I spend my infrequent free moments thinking about things to do with the kids. So when I learned that a New Jersey dive shop was offering a weekend crash course for families, I signed up myself and my 10-year-old twin boys.
That whim was made possible by the recent decision of the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, a.k.a. PADI, to lower the minimum age from 12 to 10. PADI cites huge demand from parents. More likely, the motive is commerce: Kids grow like seaweed and will bust through several $80 to $150 wet suits‹sold by padi-affiliated stores‹before they surface as adults.
Classes started one Saturday morning at 9:00. Before you can get near a pool, you've got to get through a 250-page instruction book that is not exactly geared to kids. The chapter on dive tables has you calculating, say, how much time you can spend underwater on a second dive given how long you have just spent on the surface expelling some of the nitrogen in your system. Interspersed with the technical stuff are such titillating subsections as "A Deceptively Easy Way to Die."
My boys kept up by asking questions‹until our instructor asked them to put a lid on it because they were slowing things down. When they couldn't ask about definitions, she lost them. Come final exam, they flunked. Desperate, I cloistered them in a diner for hours, bribing them with cookies, soda and pudding to sweat through the numbers and memorization. Just short of slipping into sugar comas, the boys passed.
Phase Two: We graduated to exercises in the pool‹damned hard work concentrating in wet suits that were big, hot and uncomfortable. Yet the boys were like Navy Seals in the water, as good as or better than the adults at underwater mask removal and towing a tired diver across the pool.
Now came the final hurdle of certification: the "open water" testing, which PADI requires within six months of the classwork. Before the deadline passed, I looked for a three-day trip to someplace warm, settling on a resort in the Cayman Islands, which the experts told me was kid-friendly.
They lied. It's one thing to find a dive shop that will take $249 for lessons, but quite another to find a dive master who will put 10-year-olds on a boat. Out of the 50 Caribbean dive resorts with PADI affiliation, only 15 have programs for kids.
I launched a campaign of shameless pleading. The resort I targeted caved after weeks of my faxes, phone calls and notecards‹but only after I agreed to sign a document absolving it of legal responsibility. (We later learned the dive-shop manager strenuously opposed our visit. If my kids got into trouble, there wasn't a hospital with equipment to treat nitrogen poisoning for 90 miles.)
Minutes after we arrived at the hotel a woman dive master ran to our room and pulled the kids into the pool to make sure they could handle their gear, which they did with ease. Next, her boss came over to introduce himself‹well aware of our controversial visit. I was surprised the insurance agent didn't show up, too. All this gave me pause, but I remained determined to get my kids underwater.
The next day our dive boat headed out into the blissful blue of the Caribbean. But with every gulp of salty air, I felt a looming sense of dread. I looked at my children huddled on the rail with furrowed brows and worried, distant eyes. On boats they normally behaved like dolphins on amphetamines. Now, though, they were acting like groupers on Valium. As I saw concern in their faces, I thought: These aren't fearful boys. On earlier vacations they had been charged by hippos in Africa, snapped at by caimans in Costa Rica and had plunged off 30-foot cliffs in the U.S. wilderness. Yet in this boat, at this moment, diving seemed too much. Each year, 80 Americans die from this sport. Why hadn't we gone bowling?
Then, in a splash, they were overboard, diving to 50 feet on their initial descent. They followed their instructor precisely, mastering their open-water skills, learning to hover underwater and to use a compass for navigation.
Their mother, on the other hand, was a problem child. I became separated from the instructor and, irresponsibly, descended to 100 feet. I felt terrific and was about to go deeper when a rescue diver signaled me to return to the surface. I was probably flirting with nitrogen narcosis; dive too deep and return too quickly and you can get the bends, the release of nitrogen bubbles in tissue. It can be fatal.
Nagging question: If I were alone with these boys and had a problem, could they help? Could they even rein in their crazy mom? Bloodied nose and pride aside, I suffered no damage. But my boys were burned up. Would they try it with me again? "No, Mom," they said. "We want to dive with a responsible adult!"
More to the point, given that I had spent $8,000 on this adventure, would they rather dive than play a videogame? Well, maybe. The water was too cold, and it made their skin itchy. Moral: If your 10-year-olds want to see fish, maybe you should take them to the aquarium.
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