Scuba Fundamental is a unique book for people who are thinking of learning to scuba dive. It tells them what they need to know and should do BEFORE they sign up for a course. 

It also gives them impartial and reliable advice on important things about learning to dive that nobody ever tells prospective divers about and that they only find out much later: sometimes too late.

Scuba Fundamental takes someone from the germ of the thought that they might like to scuba dive, then continues to guide them to the point where they have completed a couple of courses and twenty or so dives.

Too many people start learning to scuba dive before they are ready for it. Others have a poor learning experience when they take the course. In both cases, the result is that they do not stick with the sport, waste their time and money and end up missing out on what could have been a lifetime of incredible experiences. It is not their fault. They just do not know any better.

Before someone actually starts diving, they have no means of judging whether they are properly prepared, physically and psychologically, to dive. They have no way of distinguishing a good instructor from a bad instructor or a professional dive operator from a cowboy. After all, anyone can produce a slick website, decorate an attractive looking shop or deliver a persuasive pitch.

The fact is that scuba diving is the same as every other walk of life. There are many wonderful instructors and super-professional dive centres out there. There are also some terrible, lazy and negligent instructors around and operators that care only about taking your money and deliver poor-quality service in return.

So I decided to write this book to arm prospective divers with the knowledge to enable them to make the right decisions about learning to scuba dive. The purpose is not to teach them how to dive. Their instructors will do that. But Scuba Fundamental will make the process of learning to dive a lot easier and help them become good divers more quickly, avoiding the many pitfalls and wrong turns that lie in wait for the unwary.

When today’s veteran divers learned to dive, they were being prepared for a world where there was no mass scuba diving tourism; a world where the fact that you were a qualified scuba diver meant something very different to what it does nowadays. In those days, your qualification meant that you were ready to dive anywhere with another diver of equal ability, under no guided supervision at all. It meant that you had proven your ability to assess a dive site, plan a dive, deal with any contingencies that came your way and rescue yourself or your dive partner in an emergency.

Today, although many scuba diving manuals still promise that your first scuba diving course will qualify you to dive safely and independently, this is patently not the case. Now, most initial scuba diving classes are much shorter and less intensive than they used to be. There is really only enough time to learn the basics of handling the equipment, managing the equipment in the water and dealing with common problems.

To learn to become a competent, independent diver, as well as a useful and capable partner for another diver, takes more than one quick class and four or five dives. This is why Scuba Fundamental does not just focus on the initial certification course but, instead, accompanies new divers much further along the path, indicating the route they need to take and giving them the necessary knowledge to achieve this goal.

The book’s main premise is that if someone starts diving the right way, not only will they become good divers and safe divers, they will enjoy it more and they will make fewer mistakes. They will also avoid being cheated by people trying to sell them sub-standard courses, sub-standard equipment and sub-standard experiences. And scuba diving will be something they do throughout their lifetime, not something they just tried one day and didn’t like.