Originally posted by goofygirl
I'd like to know HOW do you start? What do you do first? How long does it take until you can SCUBA dive, and is it expensive to take classes and get certified?
If you're a college student, check to see if your school offers scuba classes.
If not, look in your local yellow pages for SCUBA, and find 2 or 3 of the local dive shops. All of them will offer classes. However, don't just go out and sign up with the first one that offers a course. Go into the store, talk to the employees. Tell them you're interested in a course through them, and just talk with them for a little bit. Ask questions, like what is the student to teacher ratio, do they require students to buy all equipment before signing up for the class, how much pool time do they offer before the open water dives, stuff like that. Just try to get a feel for the shop.
A good shop won't require that students have full equipment. Most places will require at least a mask and snorkel, some also require fins. Some shops require students to have full equipment. I'd stay away from shops like this, because on the off-chance that you don't end up liking Scuba, you've now got $500-1000 worth of gear that you won't use.
Another thing that good shops will do is let you have as much pool time as you need in order to feel comfortable. The shop I certified through told us that if we didn't feel comfortable taking the certification dives at the end of our course, we could meet with the instructor and do more pool work before we had to take the dives.
When I took my basic course, it was a 3 hour course, 1 night a week, for 8 weeks. 1 1/2 hours of classroom, and 1 1/2 hours of pool. At the end of the course, we had 5 certification dives, spread out over 2 days. Once you completed all 5, you're a certified diver. Some shops only require 2 or 3 open water dives, it depends which certification agency they're affiliated with.
The 3 major cert agencies in the US are PADI, NAUI, and SSI. All are mostly equivalent, as far as the training goes, they all cover the same points, it's just a slightly different order, and each of them has a slightly different method of teaching it. SSI requires it's instructors to be affiliated with a shop, whereas PADI instructors can freelance, or work for multiple shops as an instructor ... (not sure about NAUI)
)
