-hh wrote:
>'Mad Monk' happened to notice some SNUBA cruise ship customers in
>Cozumel a few years ago. IIRC, he nearly fell out of his chair when
>he heard the SNUBA instructor claim that SNUBA was safer because it
>didn't use compressed air (a flat out lie). "Caveat Emptor", folks.
I haven't been snuba-ing or scuba-ing, but my impression from the
brief descriptions I've seen of SNUBA has been that it doesn't use
compressed air, at least not nearly as compressed as in a scuba tank.
I thought you would be attached to an air line whose air pressure was
just enough to get air to you, and that the air came out of a pump,
not a tank. Which part of my impression was incorrect?
My previous allegist, before I moved, told me that scuba is absolutely
contra-indicated for me because I have asthma, and I assume snuba is
similarly forbidden, but I've never encountered anyone who knows
enough about snuba to tell me.
I have been snorkeling with no problems (including at the Great
Barrier Reef off Australia, which was great!).
>Insofar as the "old" ways, I'm familiar with the arguments that the
>Ditch&Don and other pool drills aren't "realistic". However, they do
>provide a controlled test setting for evaluating diver stress, force a
>student to use learned skills together, and in the end, they go a long
>ways towards improving diver confidence.
I practiced snorkeling in the hotel pool for several hours over
several days before getting on the boat to go out to the barrier reef,
and it made me feel much more confident. Being in the water miles
from the nearest land was a bit scary at first, even though I was only
a few yards from the boat. Having to learn how to breathe through a
snorkel at the same time would have been a bit much.
Some of the other people on the boat had not done any advance
preparation, and a few of them were miserable. (They were also cold,
but I had been on a rafting trip on the American River a few weeks
previously, and the South Pacific was practically a warm water bath
compared to that.)
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