Hitting the Century at the turn of the Millennium

On our last day at Catalina, one of the members in our little dive coterie passed the 100-dive milepost. In other words, she joined the Century Club in the at the turn of the millennium. (Yes, I am one of these purists who believe the millennium did start in 2001 A.D.) In a sport where most participants quit before their number of logged dives equals the age of majority, achieving five score dives is an accomplishment to be celebrated. While we did not have a brass band playing or even the Catalina barbershop quartet singing "I did it my way" upon her exit from the underwater park, you can see from the picture that the threesome dive team does have that infectious enthusiasm for the sport. If you look closely, you will see they are holding up fingers to form the numbers 1-0-0. I learned something about photography that day. Hands in black gloves do not contrast very well with a background of black wetsuits. Still, look at their expressions. This is one happy trio celebrating individual achievement. So why can’t everybody have that kind of experience?

The diving industry tells us that people quit diving because they can’t find anyone who wants to go diving. Part of our group came from the UCSB Dive Club and Santa Barbara’s Paradise Dive Club. I also recognize that if you can’t find someone to dive with in Santa Barbara, you probably couldn’t get a date if you walked into a women’s prison carrying a briefcase filled with pardons.

But how can someone hit 100 dives when others have one or two post certification dives before exiling their logbook to the shoe box or junk drawer that eventually becomes a time capsule of their unrealized dreams? Opportunity and comradery?

For example, Ben, from Massachusetts, had five dives in his log book when he took a hiatus from the sport, only to rediscover it when he came West for schooling. That Saturday on Catalina was to be his sixth dive and the first one in a couple of years since being certified. We teamed up since I came unpaired on this trip. This is not a case of "luck of the draw" or "dive buddy roulette" as practiced when one signs up for a dive boat without a designated dive buddy. Traveling as confederates allows the advantage of diving with one or many partners.

Consider that I have somewhere around 1000 dives, give or take. Somewhere in the garage I have a regulator that is about the same age as Ben. Outfitted in my dive rig, I probably weigh twice what he does in his. What an unlikely team we must have looked like. Under normal circumstances, we probably would never have met. That’s the wonder of diving, it is anything but normal. The dive was great. We played follow-the-leader as we swam through the kelp forest in loose formation, teamed by practical necessity and custom but solo in our thoughts and experience. Whether our paths will intersect again remains to be seen. But during that one dive for less than an hour’s time, it was if we were old friends. I guess in a way a single dive can be a lifetime. We hope each is unique, that 100 dives means many different experiences, rather than a single experience repeated one hundred times.

I recently looked up my sixth dive. September 16, 1984, Cat Rock, Anacapa Island, working on Openwater I certification (back in those days we had basic diver, openwater I, and openwater II certification). In a short time I did a lot of diving. Number 25 occurred during a rescue class in March 1985. I almost didn’t make it to the quarter century dive. A few weeks earlier, Valentine’s Day’s weekend in La Jolla, my own stupidity, combined with my inexperience, compounded by a bad case of salvage fever resulted in me almost not coming back from dive number 21. I learned that upon finding an anchor, one cannot swim it back to the boat using the b.c. as a lift bag (hence the name "anchor").

What a shame it would have been to leave five perfectly good pages in my first log book blank. After that incident, I decided to either get more serious about having fun or to find another activity which explains the rescue class dive entered as dive number 25, the last entry in my first log book. I have been learning about diving since. I can’t look up my 100th dive. At that time, I was working on dive boats and diving so much that did not take the time to write them down. I guess I must have hit my century in late 1986 or early 1987. The title page from my first two log books shows I did a lot of diving in the days following certification. I never kept a detailed record of my dives, what I have is very abbreviated and cryptic, kind of the log book equivalent of Cliff Notes.

In our culture, we tend to think in terms of multiples of 100 as marking achievement. In diving, we tend to mark progress toward that achievement in quarters, 25 dives, 50 dives, so on until reaching 100, then it seems to become 500, 1000 until we reach a point where number of dives becomes meaningless but time spent underwater translated into months and years becomes the ultimate achievement. At 25 dives, we become "advanced divers" and can begin to climb the leadership ladder to become an assistant instructor, dive master, or dare I dream, be admitted into the sanctum sanctorum as an instructor. But what if we don’t want to be a leader? What can we do? While student divers will whisper in reverential admiration, "he’s an instructor" when was the last time you heard anyone speak admiringly that someone was just an accomplished diver?

Never passing up the opportunity to squeeze a little more money out of the public, this disparity enabled the certification agencies to spawn programs that sell people on the idea of being recognized for non-leadership achievement with the ultimate designation as "master diver." Essentially, these consist of patches and other symbols testifying to the number of dives. Some symbols are worn like "hash marks," the overseas stripes sewn on uniforms that used to be awarded for each tour of duty completed by a soldier, one chevron for each six months. Too bad marketing programs are usually seen for what they are--a way to increase cash flow without really considering those responsible for increasing the business. Is it really a celebration of achievement when the upon reaching 100 dives, the "master" diver has to pay for the card, pin, patch, and suitable-for-framing-but-unframed certificate that heralds the occasion? The patch can’t really be sewn on a wetsuit although a warm water diver could get it as a tatoo. The problem with that is among people who traditionally wear tatoos, master diver is usually inked into the hair forearm of a sailor.

No, I think that the achievement is best recognized by the coterie, as it was that day on Catalina. After all, who is going to be more happy for us and recognize the achievement for what it is than that special group of friends on whom we confer the ultimate designation of trust and friendship, that of "dive buddy."