Water temperature is on the rise. Visibility is increasing. There’s plenty of daylight to go along with flattening seas and small surf. You’ll find a variety of migrating fishes in a lot of sites. And our kelp forests and reef communities are exploding with new life. It’s summertime, and our diving season has kicked into high gear.
Like a lot of California divers, I like to dive year ’round. Different seasons bring different conditions, different animals, and different natural phenomena. But there’s no question about it, summertime is a great time to explore our local water.
Summer is also the right time to take a class and brush up on or increase your diving skills. Or maybe you want to take up a diving activity that is new to you. That “new to me” idea is one that has remained in the forefront of my mind since the Scuba Show in Long Beach this past June. I’ve been actively diving for more than four decades, and every year when I participate in the show I am reminded that there are still a lot of things in the diving world that I don’t know and haven’t done yet.
Better yet, I realize the opportunities for all of us to expand our diving horizons are everywhere. I was in two dive centers this week, and their class and activity calendars were chock-a-bloc full of options. There were early morning beach dives, beach dives followed by picnics, boat trips out to local reefs, kelp forests and wrecks, and overnight and multi-day trips to the Channel Islands. I found upcoming classes in underwater photography, wreck diving, spearfishing, marine life identification, first aid, navigation, night diving, dry suit diving, free diving, nitrox and technical diving to go along with club meetings, film festivals and more.
There’s another significant point I would like to make here: Studies show that divers who take up various underwater activities such as still photography, videography, and marine life identification and census taking, etc. dive far more often and stay active in diving much longer than divers who fail to continue their diving education after their basic certification class. The fact is, diving is an activity you can participate in well into your adult years. And if you take advantage of the courses and activities that are offered to you, you will never run out of things to do, places to go or friends to be made.
If you want to open the door to your diving opportunities, now is the time to take the next step. It’s a very easy step to take. Your local dive center and the splendor of summertime make it all possible. All you have to do is swing by your favorite dive center and see what’s on tap!
