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a freezing Tuesday night in Brooklyn, 10 students and their instructors
gather around a pool, all dressed in slick black wetsuits and weighted
down with scuba gear. This is their last class before becoming certified
scuba divers. One by one they jump into the pool making sure to
hold onto their masks, checking their form, breathing through twisted
black tubes. The water in the pool is 80 degrees. Outside, in the
deserted streets of Brooklyn, it is under 40 degrees.
The
scene of 10 shadowy forms floating in the shallow end of the pool
seems surreal, so unlike New York. But scuba diving is alive and
well in Gotham. "I've been wanting to do this for the longest time,"
says Frank Parisi, 37, who is one of the students in the class.
"It's funny, as you get older, your games get more expensive and
so do your toys." He and his partner, James, who is also in the
class, are planning a trip to Key West, Fla., in April.
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Students
at the Scuba Network in Brooklyn getting ready to go down.
PHOTO:
Marla Lehner
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are typical of the people who earn scuba diving certificates in
New York City: They're exited about scuba diving, but they don't
want to bother with the harsh, cold waters of New York City. Sixty
percent of people who earn a certificate in the city never use it
here. They pay the average of $600 to get certified only to take
off to someplace nice and warm. "Scuba diving in New York is strenuous,"
says the owner of Scuba Network, David Feeney, 49, who has been
scuba diving for 15 years. "It is much easier in the Caribbean.
It is warmer and you have much better visibility. Up here you've
got to ask yourself 'is it worth it?'"
Scuba
Network, located on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, certifies 200 people
a year. According to Feeney the majority of New York City's scuba
divers are 'recreational divers.' By that he means that they either
take their diving skills to sunny places in the Caribbean or go
scuba diving off of Long Island on weekends to escape the hustle
of city life. People living in Manhattan, Feeney says, are more
likely to board a plane to the Bahamas than take the train to Beach
9 on Long Island, a popular diving spot in New York. "The closer
people live to Manhattan, the less likely they are to be diving
in the New York area," Feeney says.
What
is, then, the attraction of New York City's harsh unfriendly waters?
"You go down and you forget your problems, you disappear," Feeney
says. "Once you're under water, your mind finds peace." Although
his only experience so far is IN the pool, Parisi seems to have
been infatuated with scuba diving already. Coming out of the pool
he says: "It's kind of cool in the pool, the feeling of being weightless.
It's like being in space." 
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The diving bell has been known since at least the 4th century
BC. Portable diving bells were like buckets that fit over
the diver's head, allowing him to breathe and also had a glass
window revealing the view. Powerful pumps supported the air
supply from above.
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The first to patent a socalled "regulator applied to the art
of breathing under water" was a Frenchman, Jean-Jeremie
Pouilliot of Paris. In December 1826 he applied for a patent
on a regulator that used a diaphragm to control hydrogen gas
flow to an underwater lamp. Pouilliot's regulator patent remained
valid for some years, but in 1828 he applied for another one.
It was for a simple diving suit called a
" dress" supplied with air by a pump on the surface
— an arrangement that served divers for more than 100
years.
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Guy Gilpatric, an American novelist and an adventurous free
spirit, was the man who probably really started the sport
of skin diving, as it was originally called. His exploits
in the waters off the South of France with a group of friends
called the Serious Sinkers are reputed to have inspired Jacques-Yves
Cousteau. Gilpatric's technique was diving without breathing
apparatus, fins or weights. His group actually emptied their
lungs in order to sink.
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Jacques-Yves Cousteau produced the aqualung in 1943 with French
engineer Emile Gagnan, who had developed a valve for gas burners.
Cousteau's post-war book and film, The Silent World, were
to mesmerize, excite and enthuse many thousands, then and
thereafter. The equipment was primitive — the only protection
from the cold, for instance, was a woolly jumper and, possibly,
a latex hood.
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Since then, a lot of experiments and developments have taken
place, involving researchers around the world. In 1964, the
US Navy started their underwater living experiments. Simultaneously,
sports diving has taken off, starting in Britain in 1953 with
a professional diver called Trevor Hampton who began to teach
people how to scuba dive for $8 a day.
Source:
Diver Magazine, UK
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