Juvenile Spotted Drum

There are certain experiences that I don’t get to enjoy personally, but I do so through my hubby. Yesterday was one of them – well, technically it was Monday when it started. He went to the dive shop expecting to work with a certain individual and they had to do a schedule shuffle as sometimes happens. In this particular case, there was a family where the father was taking one type of training, his son was taking another course, and his parents – as in the father’s parents and the son’s grandparents, were actually taking the basic scuba course. I didn’t get all the details as to why, so my assumption here is going to be that the father became a diver and that interested the son and at some point the parents. This is not the first time that my husband had trained grandparent/grandchild combinations, although it is more common for grandparents to already be the divers and they bring along the second, and more often now, the third generation.

Scuba is a great family sport and when you step back and watch it is fun to see the interaction between the generations as they share their perceptions of the dive they have just completed. Here they are, decades apart in age and yet all a part of the joy of slipping underwater to see the marine world close-up. Technically speaking, since scuba became sort of mainstream in the early 1970s, and there are divers in their 80s and 90s that are still active, I suppose you could have four generations worth in the water, but I haven’t personally see that. It has no doubt happened somewhere and of course, is likely in the not too distant future now that diving has been embraced as a family sport.