Underwater Classroom KU student learn to SCUBA dive by getting their feet wet at Robinson Center
Brian Hott / KANSAN
Students in the HPER 108 scuba class receive last minute instruction before submerging themselves in the Robinson Gymnasium pool. This was the students first time going underwater using air tanks and breathing regulators.
- Story by Per Joergensen
- Photo by Brian Hott
One by one, the HPER 108 students disappeared beneath the surface of the Robinson Center pool—and stayed there.
This was the first time this semester's SCUBA diving students went underwater using air tanks and breathing regulators.
"It was a blast," said John Bribach, Lawrence non-traditional student. "It's a whole different world down there."
And that's only the swimming pool. Bribach enrolled in the class because a friend invited him to go diving in Cancun, Mexico, he said. If all goes according to plan, coral reefs and colorful fish will be added to Bribach's new world once he has his certificate.
He said the course cost about $170, which included equipment rental.
The University of Kansas has offered SCUBA classes for at least 25 years, said James Marshall, one of the instructors and owner of the Dive Shop, a Kansas City, Mo., business that provides instructors and equipment for the class.
Students who pass the class are awarded a National Association of Underwater Instructors certificate.
"You have to have a card certifying that you've had instruction," Marshall said. "This releases renters of boats and equipment from liability."
He said that diving was not dangerous if participants have had training.
"Accidents happen because of stupidity, lack of training and equipment failure," he said. "And equipment has been getting a lot safer in later years. People are more likely to die in boating accidents."
Marshall has been diving for 27 years, and he had no horror stories to tell, he said.
Halfway through the first underwater session, after students have practiced getting water out of their masks and breathing regulators underwater, they are given free time. They go down again, visible from the surface only as irregular shapes emitting clouds of bubbles at the deep end of the pool.
"The first time people get in the water with tanks and regulators they get so excited they don't learn anything," Marshall said. "You have to give them free time to get used to breathing underwater and to being weightless, and teach them later."
"They're doing really well trying to get used to the
equipment," said Chris Hart, one of the two instructors in the pool with the students that day.
The equipment consists of a mask, fins, an inflatable vest for buoyancy regulation and flotation, and the SCUBA, Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, itself. The SCUBA regulator is a system of valves that automatically adjusts the pressure of air coming through
the mouthpiece to the pressure of the surrounding water, allowing divers to breathe freely at any depth.
Hannah Collette, Kansas City, Mo., sophomore, had no problem breathing, but her ears hurt, she said. Although the human body adjusts easily to increased pressure under water, air at surface pressure gets trapped in the inner ear, causing the same painful ache that comes with takeoff and landing in airplanes. The trick is to pinch your nose and to blow air out through two channels connecting the inner ear and the back of the throat.
"It doesn't really hurt that bad," Collette said. She said that she had enrolled because of her interest in underwater archeology, and hoped to go on to advanced courses and eventually learn to dive on shipwrecks and in caves.
"I'm hoping it'll tie in with my career," Colette said.
Others have more leisurely goals.
"Eighty to 90 percent of these students are planning to go to the Caribbean and places like that. Some are going for honeymoons," Hart said.
For their final check-out dive, they'll have to settle for something less exotic: Beaver Lake in Arkansas. The reason they have to go all the way to Arkansas is simple, Marshall said.
"Beaver Lake is the only clear place to go diving around here," he said.
Marshall prefers the Caribbean Sea, and he gets there three or four times a year, he said. But living in the heartland has its advantages, he said: "It's like hitting your toe with a hammer; it's so good when you quit. If you keep diving in Missouri, when you get to the ocean, it's ecstasy."
Marshall said novice ocean divers were usually afraid of sharks, but he's never had any close calls with them.
The only problem he has had was with video-equipment malfunctioning underwater, he said.
"Everybody's scared to death of sharks. Fact is, you'll be lucky to even see a shark these days.
They're getting to be endangered species," he said.
The only sharks he's seen recently were nurse sharks, a docile, bottom-feeding species, he said. He said that getting close to a fourteen-foot nurse shark had been a great experience for the diver team he was in, although the shark was intimidated by them. "He was so scared, he didn't know where to go," Marshall said.
April, 1996 The Hill
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