Your Scuba Anti-Hero
If You Aren’t Scared, You Shouldn’t Be Doing This
To be honest with you, I still get a little nervous right before I enter the water. Many times it’s like that butterfly, excitement feeling. On bigger dives, those butterflies really turn into small pangs of fear. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sitting on the boat crying my eyes out and having accidents in my dry suit. It’s a healthy fear such that, in my mind, I’m constantly going over as many “what if” type scenarios I can think of.
George Irvin once said that if you aren’t afraid of technical diving, then you shouldn’t be doing it. What he meant by that, is that you have to have a significant respect for the activity of technical diving. Once you fail to respect the situation you are putting yourself (and hopefully team) in, complacency will creep up. You fail to plan and train for the dives that can lead to significant injury or death.
My first dive below 200 feet almost didn’t happen. It was a dive on a turtled barge in 240 feet of water. It was my first three deco gas dive and first time I had ever used a travel gas. What if I fumble up the bottle move? What if I drop a deco bottle (again)? What if I have a free flow on a deco reg? A bunch of stuff went through my mind. The only thing that made me move forward with the dive, and not have an accident in my dry suit, was the ability to answer all of my own questions. I remembered my training and the dozens of practice dives I did in 20 feet of water with three bottles.
You must have a healthy respect for scuba diving. It enables you to properly prepare for the dives you wish to conduct. A little bit of paranoia wouldn’t hurt as well. 
Dive Safe,
Duane
Precision Diving
About Duane Johnson
The other thing constant training and experience brings with it is the confidence and calm that it takes to deal with a sudden emergency at depth. Not all emergencies can have a contingency plan, but confidence in your ability to handle emergencies is key to survival. No “emergency” is an emergency as long as you are breathing.
I’ve often heard “the best way to avoid a diving injury is to don’t dive.” It’s even in the PADI OW videos. It’s a true enough axiom, but it implies you take risk any time you enter the water, so a diver assumes risk simply by diving. To what level, and to what degree, is a personal choice. As we progress through our education and training, we continually push that limit, because we gain confidence in our skills and reevaluate what is an acceptable risk for our experience level.
But it always helps to remember that we are not supermen when we strap on our equipment, and many that have gone before us, did not return. And many of those failed because they became complacent and all the fear had gone out of them – and when that happens, all the preparation in the world cannot help you, because you have forgotten that you are not in your natural element – and you cannot breathe water.
great post and reply! I agree whole-heartedly and although I’m a new technical diver I definitely get the butterflys before any dive involving decompression.