As you sink through the water column, the pressure your body is exposed to increases. For every 33 feet you descend in the ocean, an entire, additional atmosphere is pressing down on you. Thanks to using regulators that provide air at ambient pressure you are able to breathe as if on land. If you’re diving a drysuit, as most of us do in the Pacific Northwest, you’re also adding air to that to stop it from squeezing you in like a dehydrator baggie. No one describes this better than author Barry Lopez:

“Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.”

– And that, that feeling, well, it’s incredible.

Interested in learning to dive? Get in touch. If you have concerns about diving and simply want to give it a try, consider booking a Discover Scuba Diving session. These are great fun alone and with friends and they only take a couple of hours out of your evening.

Last changed: Mar 22 2022 at 8:16 PM

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