Without a doubt, one of the most exciting and adventurous sports is scuba diving. The underwater realm is definitely a world to itself. Seas, lakes, quarries, oceans, and rivers have submerged habitats that will capture your interest and imagination for a lifetime.

In May of 1992, a good friend of mine, with whom I was working with at the time, asked me to go scuba diving. I explained to him that I had not completed a scuba-diving course, but that it was always something that interested me. My friend, Chris, told me that he assisted in the training of scuba divers at the Mother Lode Dive Shop located on H Street in Sacramento. He told me that they were in the process of putting a class together, and that if I wanted to attend he would reserve a spot for me.

I jumped at the chance, as I had always wanted to complete this course because both my brother and brother-in-law were avid scuba divers, and were always talking of their adventures at family functions. As a child, I had watched Lloyd Bridges in the television series Sea Hunt and had always dreamed of someday being able to see the world of inner space myself.

My first day at the class, Chris introduced me to my instructor

Respiration is the next area of concern that a diver must think of when diving. Being air breathing mammals means that we cannot obtain the oxygen necessary for sustaining life directly from the water itself. Divers must take an air supply with them when they venture beneath the surface into the water. Divers must learn the best way to breath when diving to help them adapt to the underwater environment. Divers must breath efficiently.

1. Bottom time is the total time in minutes from the beginning of decent until the beginning to final ascent to the surface or safety stop.

It is important that every diver understand that during every dive, the increased pressure causes nitrogen from your breathing air to dissolve into your body's tissues. The amount your body absorbs on any given dive depends on how deep and how long your dive is. The deeper you dive and the longer you stay the more excess nitrogen your body absorbs. When the diver ascends, it decreases the surrounding pressure the nitrogen they absorb begins to leave their body. This excess nitrogen must be slowly eliminated through respiration because unlike oxygen, your body doesn't use nitrogen. What goes in, must come out. As long as the amount of excess nitrogen is kept within reasonable limits the divers body can eliminate it without complication.

In most cases, divers with decompression sickness must be treated by repressurizing the effected diver in a recompression chamber. Divers suspected of having decompression sickness should under no circumstances be put under water once symptoms occur. Treatment takes hours, much longer than the possible endurance of any diver. Divers should be transported to a medical facility with a recompression chamber. Although DCS is a serious medical condition, with proper treatment, it is rarely fatal in recreational divers.

2. Any dive planned to thirty-five feet or less should be calculated as a dive to thirty-five feet.

Any dive that a diver makes within six hours of a dive is called a repetitive dive. The dive table should definitely be utilized during all repetitive dives to ensure that the diver will not get DCS. The PADI open water diver manual recommends the following general rules for using the recreational dive planner:

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