The Dangers of Skinny Diving

What it’s about is fun. Diving in Tahiti or diving in a swimming pool, the reason you trained and bought all your gear, travel and read magazines about diving is to have fun. Sometimes we forget that.

Underwater photography is a great case in point. A few years back I was using a housed Minolta SLR to shoot photos on just about every dive. I spent hours making sure that the camera was ready, the lenses and ports were ready, batteries for the camera and strobe, enough back up film and batteries. Everything clean and lubed and ready in its case. Then when I got in the water, everything was about the shot. Finding it, setting it up, taking it, re-thinking the shot and then wondering where the fish got to.

Sometimes I’d go through an entire dive trip and it seemed like I had never taken my head out of the viewfinder. The specialty was eating up the joy of diving. I stopped diving with a camera for a long time.

Recently I bought an Olympus C-5060 Digital Camera and housed it for underwater photos. Now when I go down with the camera I make sure that I spend as much time concentrating on breathing and meditating while underwater as I do working photos. It’s a lot different – more enjoyable now – and the photos are better, too.

Every dive should have a certain amount of where the diver is dedicated to simply being underwater. Breathing right, purposely clearing the mind, and getting back in touch with the self. No where is this easier for a competent diver than when underwater. The water relaxes the muscles by negating gravity and the water insulates us from the stress and ambient microwave energy that flows though us when we are on the surface. It’s like a mini-vacation for our bodies.

Sometimes that’s all you need for a great dive.