Solo diving? Are you nuts???

OK, so I'm supposed to be this 'laid-back sport diver' and in no way a technical diver, so why on earth would I plunk down my hard-earned money to get a SDI Solo Diver certificate? Great question.

Zen diving is best done when you have the least to worry about. That means no logical ceiling - like when you are doing decompression diving - and no special depth limits - like when you are diving with Nitrox. That stuff creates diver stress and doesn't promote the Zen experience.

One thing that does promote a good Zen diving experience, however, are excellent self-rescue skills. Nothing is more comforting than knowing - from extensive training - that you can get yourself out pretty much any difficult situation that you might encounter while diving.

I have been diving for a few years. Back in the eighties, when I was younger and more adventurous, I learned New Jersey wreck diving from the old mossback divers like Gary Gentile and Evelyn Dudas. With these people you learned by watching and braving questions once in a while. They were early adopters, and often the original developers of a lot of the technical diving skills that are taught today. Redundancy, duplicate air supplies, gas management, navigation, unplanned ascents. etc. Back then, we learned way too much by trial and error and every diver was expected to be able to get back to the boat on their own, even if they had a catastrophic equipment failure and their buddy had wandered out of range.

"Even if you have a buddy," they would say, "you are still diving alone."

You can learn these skills in any of a number of areas including tech diving courses and wreck courses, as well as bits an pieces of advance PADI coursework, but the best individual certification that addresses individual competence and survivability underwater is the SDI Solo Diver Course.

I took the course with Nicola Martin on the Explorer Venture live aboard off of Turks and Caicos, not to learn the skills (I already used them regularly) but to get the C-Card. Pre-requisites to take the course were having at least 100 dives logged. For me, the key advantage of getting this cert was that in a lot of locations now, showing this card saves me from being assigned to an arbitrary buddy. As a photo diver, that means that I can concentrate on getting the shot, rather than keeping a stressed out divemaster happy that he or she is being followed by all of his or her ducks.

Even if you never want to do a decompression dive, get technical, or penetrate a wreck, even if you never want to actually dive alone, I highly recommend this program. You'll be a better diver for it.