What makes a man jump off a perfectly good boat?

What made me want to scuba dive?

hangover = scuba

This is a question all divers are asked by friends and family at some stage in their diving career. The main reason i started diving was largely due to a hangover. I find that after i have been drinking, the next day, which is usually a Sunday, is spent trawling the internet, searching ebay and generally finding a way to spend money on things i don't need in order to numb the growing depression i am feeling caused by the previous nights alcohol abuse.


So on a Sunday in Sept 2008 i was doing my usual surf extravaganza. After having read the entire internet Kerri and i began talking about things we were looking forward to in order to relieve the overwhelming urge to form a suicide pact. This conversation revolved around our up coming wedding in Sri Lanka and honeymoon in The Maldives, yes, we are good to ourselves and have all the money.

We began to focus on The Maldives and how much we were looking forward to lying on a beach in a remote island in the blazing sun. In the brochure there were pictures of beaches, eating out, drinking (which we glanced over) and scuba diving. Apparently The Maldives is the scuba diving capital of the world. Oh?

At that very moment i decided we should do some scuba diving while we were there, but we didn't know how. So we would take a scuba class in The Maldives. It then quickly moved on to the idea that we should learn before we went so we didn't have to study anything whilst on holiday. This was an amazing idea by me. But how? We knew absolutely nothing about the sport. Was it even called a sport? Is it a hobby? We didn't know. We had to find out....right now.

So, back onto the internet. May i just explain quickly that both Kerri and i are obsessive by nature and like to read and know as much as possible about our interests. We spent the next 6 hours or so learning to dive online. By the time we had finished we knew all the courses we would take for the next 10 years, where we would be going on scuba trips and that an octopus was a stupid name for the yellow breather thing and that the first stage would be better being called this as it had "legs" coming out of it.

PADI

However, we knew that we probably would need some recognised license or something to dive on holiday so the research continued. It seemed PADI was the most popular so we became PADI divers instantly and planned to move to Thailand, become instructors, leave our day jobs far behind and drink beer on the beach in between dives. We needed someone to teach us, and fast.

Another quick google brought up PADI instructors in Northern Ireland. We simply picked one that had try dives at our local pool, gave the guy a ring and did a pool dive on the Tuesday.

That weekend we gave the guy a stupid amount of money out of our wedding budget and signed up for Open Water and Advanced Open Water there and then.

What had we done?