I Am the 15%
The 15% Rule: Why Some People Lose Their Minds Over Scuba Diving
My Open Water instructor back in California had a rule of thumb.
About 5% of students would dive once for something special. A vacation. A bucket list item. Something they could talk about later at parties.
About 80% would enjoy diving, go on trips every few years, and have an honestly wonderful time doing it.
But about 15%?
Those people would absolutely lose their minds over scuba diving.
They’d get bitten by the bug hard.
Suddenly they were diving every weekend. Reading about marine life at midnight. Watching equipment reviews during lunch breaks at work. Planning trips they couldn’t afford yet. Standing around next to a freezing cold quarry in a 7mm wetsuit genuinely excited just to get underwater again.
At the time, I thought it was funny.
Fifteen years later, I think he was completely right.
Because I was absolutely one of the 15%.
Bitten by the Bug: Finding Comfort and Sharing the Underwater World
I learned to dive in 2010, and something about it hit me differently than almost anything else I’ve ever experienced. I started diving almost every weekend. Sometimes multiple times a weekend. The ocean, quarries, lakes, whatever I could get into. I just wanted to be underwater.
And the strange thing is that I’m not even sure I can fully explain why.
There’s just something about the underwater world that feels different.
The quiet.
The weightlessness.
The way stress evaporates the moment your face slips below the surface.
The feeling of hovering over a reef while fish move around you like you’re visiting another planet.
Words don’t really do it justice.
That’s actually part of the reason I got into underwater photography.
I do not consider myself an artist. Honestly, when I look back at the photos I took during my first couple years underwater, I cringe a little. They were rough. Bad lighting. Terrible composition. Fish butts disappearing into the distance. The occasional blurry shape that I’m pretty sure was technically a turtle. Somewhere in there was my very first flooded camera enclosure too. 🙁
But I loved what I was seeing underwater so much that I wanted to share it with the people in my life somehow.
Photography became my bridge.
And weirdly, those terrible early photos are still important to me because they remind me of something I try to tell newer divers all the time:
You do not have to start out good at this.
You just have to start.
If you compare where I started to where I am now, the improvement is honestly ridiculous. Not because I’m uniquely talented, but because I kept diving. I kept practicing. I kept learning. I kept spending time underwater.
That’s really the secret to becoming comfortable underwater.
Not magic gear.
Not shortcuts.
Not trying to buy your way into confidence.
Time.
Comfort underwater comes from being underwater.
It comes from repetition. Patience. Experience. Small mistakes. Tiny improvements you barely notice until one day you realize you’re relaxed in a place that used to make you nervous.
And I think that realization quietly shaped the kind of instructor I eventually became.
The Disneyland of Dark Water: From Low Drama to Public Safety Diving
People sometimes tell me I’m a great teacher, and I never quite know how to respond to that because I don’t think of myself as somebody who could teach just anything.
I’m not secretly a math professor trapped inside a wetsuit.
I just really, really love diving.
And when you deeply love something, you naturally want to share it with other people.
Not in an aggressive way. Not in a “look how badass I am” way. Honestly, I’ve never been very interested in flexing in dive culture.
When I travel somewhere to dive, I’m not the guy announcing that I’m an instructor the second I step on the boat. I don’t need special treatment. I don’t want to be babysat, but I also don’t need to dominate the room.
I just want to dive.
I want everyone to have a good time.
I don’t want to bother anyone, and quite frankly, I don’t really want anyone bugging me either.
The loudest person on the boat is almost never the best diver anyway.
The truly comfortable divers are usually calm. Relaxed. Observant. Low drama.
They’re there because they love diving.
That’s it.
I carry my instructor card and my Nitrox card. Everything else mostly accumulated over time through opportunity, curiosity, public safety diving, and wanting to be prepared for the kinds of diving I wanted to do.
Some of those certifications came through years of service with a fire department public safety dive team.
And public safety diving definitely was not a vacation.
Cold water.
Dark water.
Zero visibility.
Long training days.
The leadership there had been burned before by people who showed up looking for free certifications and cool stories. What they needed were people who genuinely wanted to be there.
Meanwhile, there I was treating every training dive like I’d been invited to Disneyland, even when the water was cold, dark, and visibility barely existed.
That kind of goofy enthusiasm apparently counted for something.
And honestly, I think that same feeling still drives the way I teach now.
A Fatherly Guide to Finding What Excites You Underwater
These days I’m much less interested in telling people what class they “should” take.
Instead, I usually ask people what they want from diving.
What do you want to see?
What excites you?
What kind of diving sounds fun to you?
Because diving doesn’t have to look the same for everybody.
Some people want sharks.
Some people want shipwrecks.
Some people want underwater photography.
Some people just want to relax and float weightless for an hour while the rest of the world goes quiet.
All of those are valid.
Part of teaching, at least for me, is probably connected to being a dad.
There’s this instinct to guide people safely toward something that might genuinely change their lives the way it changed mine.
Not push them.
Not pressure them.
Just help them feel comfortable enough to discover it for themselves.
And every now and then, during a class, I see it happen.
You can actually watch the moment the bug bites somebody.
Their breathing slows down.
Their shoulders relax.
They stop fighting the water.
They start noticing little things underwater instead of just focusing on themselves.
And suddenly you can tell:
Uh oh.
This person might be one of the 15%.
Honestly?
That might be my favorite part of teaching.
