The Crew's Log
Past and present students and instructors write about their experiences skin and scuba diving with the Challenges Foundation.
Amy E. Alexander
For someone who is physically or 'gravity' challenged, scuba diving is a way to experience weightlessness and freedom. I sustained a spinal cord injury from a car accident in 1994, and I think the first time I truly laughed out loud after that wasn't until the summer of 1999, when I went scuba diving for the first time. As I surfaced the water after my dive, I could not contain my joy, and just burst out laughing from the sheer fun of it; the freedom of it. My experience never would of been made possible, however, without the Challenges Foundation. As I did not have the finances for scuba diving, Challenges funded everything from my custom made wetsuit to pool lessons. In order for others to be able to continue experiencing the physical and mental benefits of scuba, the Challenges Foundation needs your financial support. Get involved today, and help make someone laugh out loud.
Please visit Amy's website Spinal Times
Sarkes Demirjian
SCUBA diving has giving me the opportunity to see the world, above and below. It has been and still is a pleasure to interact with people of all types around the world when we're on our diving vacation abroad. It has give me the self confidence to be active and interact with others, being disabled (Challenged) person, it is not easy to accommodate the able-bodied world with all the obstacles in our paths. There are no obstacles when we dive, we are all equal under water, we all wear the same cumbersome suits when diving, and it does limits our movements and sights in all of us. It is only in the eyes of the beholder to say or see whether who is or not disabled (challenged). It is what you make of your life and how you perceive it.
Steve Cortright
The owner of the dive shop squirmed uneasily in his ratty boat moccasins. I had just quit my first job out of college and beat a path to his dive shop. A sign posted on the cash register read: "WARNING! We shoot every third salesman.... And the second one just left." Clearly, I was in the presence of a no-nonsense personality. He just peered at me and my wheelchair. The wheelchair could probably do with an explanation. I was born without legs and half of my right arm. In rehabilitation medical parlance, I am a triple-amputee. Even though my limbs were never surgically removed, the amputee moniker sticks. Some mysteries are better left unsolved. I went to public school. I drive a modified car that has hand controls to work the gas and brake pedals. I am very mobile and get around alternating between a lightweight wheelchair and a skateboard. I can cook, clean, and balance my checkbook. In short, I do pretty much everything you do except put my pants on one leg at a time. The shop owner was friendly about declining my business as a dive customer, though. He offered to track down the name and number of some outfit that specialized in "special cases" like mine. I left the shop with word to check back in a week. As I drove away, I reflected on my aborted attempts at learning to dive over the years. My first attempt was in junior high. Just some vague talk about working with Easter Seals or some other organization to do some pool exercises. My parents supported the idea but the administrators of the public school were petrified. Upstate New York doesn't have an excess of indoor swimming pools, so that idea drifted away. I attended college in Riverside, California -- a desert city 70 miles from the ocean -- when the dive bug bit me again. There was a dive shop right off the freeway near campus. A dive shop in the middle of the desert. Why not? I milled around the shop waiting for the salesman to finish with several other customers ahead of me. It was quality time for me. I looked around for prices on renting SCUBA equipment and didn't find any. Then, I ran a quick tally of what it would cost to buy all the dive gear I guessed I would need. I skipped the price check on fins; a savings of 75 dollars. All told, a full set of gear was over a thousand dollars. I asked the portly salesman how much a set of lessons would cost. In my naivete, I believed you bought SCUBA instruction like piano lessons -- buy a package of 10 lessons in advance. He informed me that if I bought all my dive equipment there, he would teach me. This didn't sound too good on two levels. First, what if I hated it? Second, what if he was a lousy teacher? I thanked him for the information and told him I would think about it. I let the dream die. After graduating from college, I moved to the San Fernando Valley and took the first job that presented itself during the recession of the early 1990s. I worked in this job for two and a half years. I was miserable. The work was both boring and stressful. My life was passing me by and I needed to shake things up. In May of 1993, I had had enough and quit. On my way out the office door, an image of a small dive shop in town popped into my head. No reason. It just popped like I just quit. I had saved a fair amount of money over the last two years and decided to buy dive gear and get my SCUBA certification. If I hated it, I'd sell the gear in the newspaper. My visit to this dive shop was very different from the one in Riverside. This shop owner wasn't eager to take my money. A refreshing change. A week later he had a name and phone number of a dive certifying agency called the Handicapped Scuba Association. This, in turn, led to another phone number of a woman who was the travel coordinator for a group of people that formed the core of ChallengesFoundation.org. The woman, Julie Perez, had an easy going manner that immediately made me feel like a long time friend. She invited me for a boat trip aboard a very unique vessel, The Western Star. This was the only dive boat with access provisions for the disabled. Even more impressive than the boat was the people on board the boat. I was immediately welcomed as a regular. The instant camaraderie, good company, and sense of teamwork was one of the most invigorating experiences of my life. And that was just as a passenger for a day long boat ride. I hadn't even begun my dive training. The boat had two dive instructors on board that day. Nicolas Coster, one of the instructors, was also the boat captain and the founder of ChallengesFoundation.org. We spent some time talking about the sport, boats, and the ocean. The conversation put me at ease instantly. There was a cool, rational approach to everything done on board. Safety lectures were thorough but not heavy-handed. The process of getting divers in the water was well organized and made to look easy. I chatted with the other dive instructor, Wayne Barclay. We hit it off, too. After talking about work schedules with Wayne and Nicolas, we came to an agreement that Wayne would take the lead in my training with Nick providing support and assistance. This support and assistance included equipment loans and use of Nick's pool. Pool training and classroom instruction started immediately. We had a tough task ahead. Most dive equipment and gear is "off the rack." That means very little is custom tailored to the individual. Trying to find wet-suits to fit a triple amputee was impossible. We improvised with duct tape and clever folding techniques that made origami look primitive by comparison. The wet-suit issue was just for openers. In order to counteract the increased buoyancy of the wet-suit, divers wear weight belts to make themselves sink. Most divers put this weight around their waist. That wouldn't work in my case because I would be permanently upright underwater. This makes it impossible to efficiently move through the water. We had to experiment endlessly with placing weight belts on different parts of my upper torso. Then came the challenges of working out safe entries and exits from the water. At the same time, we are pushing hard to learn the things every beginning dive class also has to cover. These are skills like the proper way to give and receive a spare breathing mouthpiece, called an octopus, to your dive buddy underwater. The most important skill, however, was something called Global Awareness. This is the ability to perceive everything going on around you and use this perception to both stay out of trouble and experience your surroundings to their full potential. We pushed hard through the months of August and September. On September 19, 1993, I was ready for my first ocean dive. This would entail more basic skills and a tour of the underwater rocks in the area. It was 39 minutes of amazing views and great challenges and bliss. The first dive experience in the ocean is always unforgettable. All of your senses clamor for your brain's attention. My eyes were darting every which way checking my dive gauges and keeping track of my dive buddy. The skin on my face tingled from the cold water hitting the parts not covered by the mask. My ears were tracking the rhythm of everyone breathing in perfect synchronization. I smiled and got both a mouthful and two nostrils of sea water. The smell and taste burned but I didn't care. The near weightless sensation was a natural feeling for me. After we finished some basic skills, we wanted to test some of our theories about weight placement and orienting my body in different positions in the water. This made me love diving even more. This was a combination of physical and mental discipline. I had to focus on where my body was relative to the ocean bottom and continue to breathe normally. The sensation of a few light hand motions gently raising my body from the ocean floor was mind blowing. I never had this kind of physical freedom on land. I could corkscrew, twist, and roll in all kinds of directions that would be impossible anywhere else on earth. We needed to make many more refinements to my weight system; but it was perfection to me. With this huge success propelling us forward, my instructors and I fought the weather and schedule conflicts for another eight months to get in more dives. By the end of April 1994, I was a certified diver! The whole experience changed me. I became more extroverted and less self conscious about my appearance. I also learned to take more calculated risks in my life and win. I credit the Global Awareness skill taught in diving for this transformation. I think everyone is endowed with this skill; but not everybody can tap into it on demand. With this new sense of power, I found a new career; not just a job. And I recognized the difference. Something that high school guidance counselors could never seem to figure out how to communicate to me. I also had new social and recreational activities open up all around me. They were there all along, I just never noticed. I took a sailing class without giving it a second thought. My number of friends multiplied. The SCUBA training brought my life into focus. Or, as they would say in the dive training manual, "Stop. Think. Get control."