So You Want to Try Diving

I was nineteen, on the Great Barrier Reef, and I had never been a confident swimmer. That is the part that still surprises me. I got in expecting to struggle, and instead every skill the instructor asked for simply worked. I spent most of the dive away from him, not out of bravado, but because I never once needed to grab hold of anything. Then a shark came past. Unhurried, completely uninterested in me, and one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

When we surfaced, he told me I should get certified.

I didn’t, for six years. But the sentence stayed.

What kept me coming back is harder to put in a table. It is quiet down there in a way nothing on land is quiet. Everything is fleeting (the light, the animals, the visibility, the fact that you have a fixed number of minutes and then you leave) and that forces a kind of attention I have never managed to reproduce anywhere else. You aren’t thinking about anything else, because you can’t.

I have around sixty dives. I am not an instructor, not a divemaster, and not the most experienced person you know. But I am the person several friends have called after deciding they might want to try this, and I have now explained the same eight things enough times to write them down.

One thing about how this page is written. I have about sixty dives and I have been to four countries. This guide covers rather more than that, so every claim carries a label saying where it comes from:

Lived I did this myself.   Reported someone I trust told me, and I name them.   Researched I looked it up and checked it.   Reasoned, not tested I decided it but haven’t proven it yet.

Unlabelled prose is my own experience or general knowledge that isn’t in dispute. The point is that you can tell the difference. A guide that quietly blends what its author lived with what its author googled is worth much less than one that doesn’t.

One thing worth saying plainly before any of it: this is an expensive hobby. Not ruinously, but it is not a cheap one and it never becomes cheap. There’s no budget version of a dive trip worth taking, and I’m not going to write around that or suggest ways to shave it down. If the cost is the thing standing in your way, that’s a real answer and not a failure of planning.

This is what I would tell you over coffee. It covers roughly the first 80%: how the certifications actually work, where to get certified from India and when each place is actually open, the honest shape of what a first year costs (and I’ll be straight that these are ranges and starting points, not quotes, because Indian dive schools mostly don’t publish their prices) and what I own, with the reasoning, rather than a shopping list. The remaining 20%, which destination fits you, whether it is worth the money on your budget, whether you will hate having a mask on your face, is the part worth an actual conversation. There’s a note at the bottom about that.

1. Is diving for you? The honest filter

Most people who ask me this have the wrong worry. They think the barrier is fitness or swimming. It is almost never either.

You do not need to be a strong swimmer. The actual requirement to certify is a 200 m swim with no time limit and any stroke you like (dog paddle counts) or 300 m with mask, snorkel and fins. Plus a ten-minute float or tread. That is the whole watermanship bar. People who “can’t really swim” pass it every day.

What actually matters is comfort in water. Different thing entirely. Comfort means: something unexpected happens (your mask floods, your regulator gets knocked out of your mouth, you can’t tell which way is up for a second) and your response is to pause and deal with it rather than bolt for the surface. Diving is not physically demanding. It is emotionally demanding in short, specific bursts, and the whole sport rewards a slow heart rate. The calmest person on the boat uses the least air and gets the longest dives. That is not a metaphor; it is literally how it works.

I got certified six years later, in the Maldives, on a trip that was half meditation retreat and half dive course. One day the current came up far stronger than anything we had trained in, and the dive was hard. I stayed on my instructor’s shoulder and signalled okay every time he turned to check, because I was okay, not because I was being tough about it. On the boat afterwards he said: “that was a difficult dive, you should be proud of yourself.”

I’ve thought about that a lot since, and I don’t think he was telling me I was strong. I think he was telling me I was calm, and calm was the thing actually being tested. That’s the whole skill. Not fitness, not swimming.

And here is the uncomfortable part, which most guides skip: I don’t think I learned that.

I certified on a trip that was half meditation retreat, taught by people serious about breathing and stillness, at a point in my life when I needed it. It helped me a great deal. But I don’t believe it is why I’m calm underwater, and I have turned this over, because it would be a much tidier story if it were. The calm underwater feels like something else. Closer to an intuitive survival instinct than a trained skill. It turned up on my very first dive, years before any of the meditation, when I was a nervous swimmer who got in expecting to struggle.

So I’m not going to sell you a method for acquiring it. I don’t have one, and I’d be inventing it.

What I’d say instead: go and find out. This is exactly what a try dive is for, and it’s why I’d push you toward one before any course, any gear, and any of the numbers further down this page. Not as a taster. As a test. Half a day and a few thousand rupees will tell you something about yourself that no amount of reading can. It’s what my first dive was, and it’s how I found out.

The real filters, in the order they actually eliminate people:

• Ears. This is the big one. If you can’t equalise the pressure in your ears as you descend, diving hurts and you stop. Most people can learn: pinch your nose and gently blow, before it hurts, every metre or so on the way down. But if you’re congested, you don’t dive that day. No exceptions, no toughing it out. A cold is the single most common reason a paid-for dive gets cancelled.
• Claustrophobia. Not the water, the mask. Something on your face, something in your mouth, and no ability to just stand up and walk away. A useful home test: put a snorkel mask on, sit on your sofa, and breathe through it for five minutes. If that makes you want to tear it off, the pool session will too.
• Seasickness. Enormously underrated as a filter. Plenty of dive sites are a 45–90 minute boat ride each way, often on a small boat, and the ride out is the worst part of the day for a meaningful number of divers. This gets much more serious on a liveaboard, where you can’t just go home. There’s a lot you can do about it (§8), but if you’re the person who goes green on a ferry, know this going in.
• Medical history. There is a standard medical questionnaire before any course. Asthma, heart conditions, diabetes, epilepsy, pregnancy, recent surgery, some medications: any of these means a doctor has to sign off before you can dive. This is worth sorting before you book anything, because finding a doctor in India who is willing to sign a dive medical is more annoying than it should be, and you don’t want to discover that the morning your course starts. Talk to your own doctor early.

Fitness barely registers. If you can carry a suitcase up a flight of stairs and swim a slow 200 m, you’re fine.

2. The certification ladder

Almost all the confusion here is people assuming this is more complicated than it is. It isn’t. There is one certification that matters, one that’s worth adding, and then everything else is optional.

Two things this table won’t tell you.

First, the course fee is not the cost. Add flights, accommodation, food, marine-park fees, equipment rental, and the certification card. The course is often less than half of what the week costs. Real numbers in §4.

Second, certifications don’t make you a diver. Dives do. A person with an OW card and forty dives is a far better and safer diver than a person with a Rescue card and twelve. The card is permission; the logbook is skill. Those are two different purchases and it’s worth knowing which one you’re making: a certification buys you access to dives you couldn’t otherwise do, and the dives themselves are what make you good at them. Don’t mistake one for the other in either direction.

PADI or SSI?

The question everybody asks and it matters much less than you’d think. Both are WRSTC-compliant, both are recognised at essentially every dive shop on earth, and the skills you learn are near-identical because both agencies teach to the same underlying standard. The differences are administrative: SSI ties your digital materials and records to the shop and is usually a bit cheaper; PADI’s materials are yours independently and it has the larger global shop network.

The verdict: choose the instructor and the dive shop, not the agency. A patient instructor with four students at a mediocre shop will make you a better diver than a rushed one with eight students at a famous one. Ask about student-to-instructor ratio before you ask about the logo. Anything above 4:1 for open-water training and you’re getting less attention than you’re paying for.

My own path, and what I’d change

Roughly sixty dives across all of that.

Two things that table shows better than a paragraph could. First, the gap: six years between the dive that made me want this and the course that let me have it, and nothing about that was a plan. If what’s stopping you is that you tried it once years ago and never followed it up, that was me, and it was all still there waiting.

Second, look at the spacing. I am not a frequent diver. Roughly one trip a year, sometimes less. You do not have to become a person who dives constantly for this to be worth doing.

The gap is the part worth naming. Six years passed between the dive that made me want this and the course that let me have it. None of that was a plan. If the thing stopping you is that you tried it once years ago and never followed it up, that was me, and it was all still there waiting.

Honestly? Nothing. I get asked this a lot and I keep landing in the same place.

Advanced Open Water straight after Open Water was right for me. Nitrox was useful immediately. Not “one day,” immediately. And Deep earned its place emphatically; there’s a story further down about exactly what it bought me. None of it was wasted and none of it was too early.

What I’d resist is turning that into a prescribed order for you. The right sequence is personal, and it’s set by two things: your comfort and your opportunity. If the trip is happening, the course is available and you feel ready, take it. If you don’t feel ready, don’t. A card you weren’t comfortable earning isn’t worth much.

Where I am now is probably the more useful data point. I’ve stopped collecting certifications, because the ones I hold already cover every dive I currently want to do. What I’m working on instead is trim and buoyancy, the unglamorous part that no card records and that actually determines whether you’re any good in the water. That seems to be the arc: certifications until they stop being the thing limiting you, then skill, more or less forever.

3. Where to get certified

This is the decision that actually changes your experience, and it’s mostly a question of water clarity and season, not price. Learning to dive in 4 m visibility is a worse experience than learning in 20 m. You spend the course anxious and looking at silt, instead of relaxed and looking at fish. Both cost roughly the same.

Note the seasons carefully. India’s dive sites are governed by the monsoon, and, this is the useful bit almost nobody mentions, the two coasts are open at opposite times of year.

Here is the whole thing in one grid. Find your month, read down. Researched I’ve dived three of these; the seasons are checked, not remembered.

                       J  F  M  A  M  J  J  A  S  O  N  D
  LEARN HERE
    Maldives           █  █  █  █  ▒  ▒  ▒  ▒  ▒  ▒  ▒  █
    Koh Tao            ▒  ▒  █  █  █  █  █  █  █  ▒  ░  ░
    Similan / Khao Lak █  █  █  █  ▒  ░  ░  ░  ░  ▒  █  █
    Lakshadweep        ▒  ▒  ▒  ▒  ▒  ░  ░  ░  ░  ▒  ▒  ▒
    Andamans           █  █  █  █  ▒  ░  ░  ░  ░  ▒  ▒  █
    Pondicherry        ░  ▒  ▒  ▒  ▒  █  █  █  █  ░  ░  ░
    Bali               ▒  ▒  ▒  █  █  █  █  █  █  █  █  ▒

  GO HERE ONCE YOU'RE CERTIFIED
    Red Sea, Egypt     ▒  ▒  █  █  █  ▒  ▒  ▒  █  █  █  ▒
    Raja Ampat         █  █  █  ▒  ░  ░  ░  ░  ░  ▒  █  █

    █ best    ▒ open    ░ monsoon / closed

Three things fall out of that grid that are hard to see any other way.

One: the Indian monsoon shuts almost everything, and Pondicherry is the exception. June through September, every Indian site on that list is closed except Pondicherry, which sits on the east coast and runs on the opposite schedule. If you decide in July that you want to learn to dive in India, that is functionally your only option.

Two: Koh Tao’s best season is exactly India’s worst. March to September is its peak, which is the window when the Indian west coast is either closing or shut. That’s a practical argument for Thailand I hadn’t thought to make before laying the months out side by side: it isn’t only about price or teaching culture, it’s that Koh Tao is good precisely when nothing here is.

Three: the Similan season is a hard closure, not a preference. The Thai national park shuts roughly 16 May to 14 October every year. Not “quieter.” Closed. That date range decides your year, and you book it before you book anything else.

And note where the Similans sit in that grid: in the learn-here block, not the later one. Most people think of them as a liveaboard destination you graduate to. They’re also a good place to start. You’d base yourself at Khao Lak on the mainland, and the diving you’re learning in is the diving people fly across the world for. Learning somewhere that good is not a luxury; §1 argues it’s most of what decides whether you carry on.

Ordered by what I’d actually recommend, not alphabetically or by price. The three at the top are the ones I’d point a first-timer at; the rest are real options I’d happily dive, listed so you can see the trade-offs rather than take my word for it.

What the table means in practice:

• Andamans is the best diving in India and it isn’t especially close. Warm, clear, healthy reef, and it feels like a proper trip. It is also the most expensive and the most logistically involved. The flight to Port Blair plus the ferry to Havelock eats a full day each way, and both need booking well ahead in season.
• Pondicherry is the one to remember, because it is open from February to September when the entire west coast is shut for the monsoon. If you decide in June that you want to learn, this is basically your only Indian option. Reported · a friend who certified there A friend certified there and enjoyed it, which is the strongest thing I can honestly say about it, and it’s more than I can say for the next two.
• Koh Tao certifies more divers than almost anywhere on the planet. That’s a double-edged thing: enormous choice, very competitive prices, an entire economy built around teaching, but also high-volume operations where quality varies a lot between shops. It rewards doing your homework on the specific shop; it punishes walking in and picking the cheapest board outside.
• Bali is the quiet strong option. Tulamben’s Liberty wreck is shore-accessible, calm, shallow and famous, which makes it an unusually pleasant place to learn. A caution worth stating: Nusa Penida is not a place to learn. Manta rays and mola mola, yes, and also serious currents and cold thermoclines. Go there after you have thirty or forty dives, not during your course.

So where would I actually send you?

People ask me this as a question about geography or price. I think it’s neither.

Don’t optimise your first trip for cheap or convenient. Optimise it for exciting. You are deciding whether this becomes a thing you do or a thing you did once, and a certification earned somewhere that took your breath away is a very different object from one earned in murky water forty minutes from an airport. The money you save learning somewhere dull is the most expensive money you’ll spend, because the most likely outcome is that you never go again.

Then match the place to how you actually learn. Two very different right answers:

If you learn by being thrown in the deep end: the Maldives. Lived It is the harder of the two. You will be figuring things out because the conditions require it rather than because a syllabus scheduled it, and the day I remember most is the one I nearly wasn’t ready for. If pressure is how you learn, if you’d rather be slightly out of your depth and work it out, the reward is proportionate. You finish having genuinely dived, not having completed a course.

On what it costs: the Maldives is materially more expensive than any of the Indian options, and more than Koh Tao. Not marginally, meaningfully. I’m not putting my own trip’s number on a public page, but don’t let the absence of a figure let you assume the gap is small. Price a real week properly, flights included, before you settle on it as your certification destination. It is the most expensive recommendation in this section, and it should be chosen deliberately rather than arrived at by accident.

If you want time, calm and thoroughness: Koh Tao. Reported · Azeem, Orca Mumbai I’d rather tell you exactly whose opinion this is than hide behind “people say”: it’s Azeem’s, the main instructor at Orca, the person who ran my confined-water training and who was with me in the Similans. He is my first call on almost any diving question, and Koh Tao is his favourite place in the world to dive.

That’s the kind of second-hand you can actually weigh. He’s a career instructor, he’s seen where I’m weak in the water, and he isn’t selling me a trip. Everything I hear about the island points the same way: relaxed, patient, built around teaching, with sheltered water to learn in. If you’re the anxious one, if you’d rather go slowly and get it properly right than survive it, that’s the profile. I’d send an anxious first-timer there over the Maldives without hesitating, and I’m planning to go myself, at which point this paragraph gets rewritten with something I actually know.

If you’re staying in India: Lakshadweep, not the Andamans. Reported · Anees, owner of Orca This comes from Anees, who owns Orca, and it’s his favourite place to dive in India: Bangaram, the most beautiful diving in the country, and materially more untouched than the Andamans, which have a lot of government development in progress right now. I’m passing on a specific person’s opinion rather than a general impression, which I think is worth more. You can weigh a named diver’s favourite; you can’t weigh “I heard.” Note what kind of claim that is: a dated observation about a place that is actively changing, not a permanent fact. If you’re reading this years after it was written, re-check it. The entire reason I’d point you to Lakshadweep over the Andamans could have expired.

Researched Bangaram has a PADI dive centre on the island, and Open Water runs there over three to four days. Agatti and Kadmat have dive schools too; Kadmat’s is the oldest in the country. So this is a real place to certify, not just a place to dive once you already hold a card, which is the thing I actually wanted to know before passing the recommendation on.

⚠ Researched Sort the permit before anything else, because it has a real lead time. Every visitor to Lakshadweep needs an entry permit from the Lakshadweep Administration, applied for online at epermit.utl.gov.in. The requirements have changed more than once recently and I’m not going to freeze them here, but expect ID, expect it to take a couple of weeks to clear, and expect at least one document that surprises you for a domestic holiday. Start the process well over a month out, and read the current rules on the portal rather than a blog. Bangaram accommodation is booked through the administration’s own portal rather than the open market. Then it’s a flight to Agatti and a boat transfer onward.

Which reframes the whole recommendation: Lakshadweep isn’t a place you decide on in a fortnight. It’s a place you plan a month and a half out. If you’re the kind of person who books trips three weeks before flying, that alone may decide this for you.

And to be clear about what this recommendation is and isn’t: it’s about how good the diving is, not what it costs. Bangaram’s course fee sits in much the same band as the Andamans’, and the permit and the Agatti flight are on top. Go for the reason Anees goes: because it’s the best of it.

Which is the honest reconciliation of this whole section: the Indian sites are real and I’d dive them, but I’d treat most of them as places to keep diving (cheaply, often, close to home) rather than as the place you fall in love with it. The falling-in-love trip is worth spending on once.

And one disclosure that belongs right here, because it changes how much weight to put on the last few paragraphs: of the Indian destinations on this page, I have personally dived none of them. My diving has been the Maldives, Thailand, Egypt and Australia. What I have instead is a Mumbai dive shop I trust, a coach, and friends who have been, which is worth something, and is not the same as having gone. Weight it accordingly.

Operators I’d actually vouch for

Short list on purpose. These are places I have dived with, not places I have read about.

Simply Breathe, Rasdhoo, Maldives. Where I certified, December 2018. An Indian-founded outfit (Michelle Pereira, Karan Mehta and Bhushan Bagadia, three friends who started it together, as far as I can tell substantially so that they’d get to dive more) running diving alongside mindfulness and conservation work. That pairing isn’t a marketing angle: the trip I did really was half meditation retreat. Michelle, who teaches the meditation side, is one of the most beautiful people I know.

⚠ Date this one anyway. December 2018 is nearly eight years ago as I write, and that is long enough for a small operation to change in ways I wouldn’t know about. They are still operating (I checked) but read the recommendation as “this was excellent when I went” rather than as a current guarantee, and ask them who’s teaching now.

The India point is worth pulling out separately, because it’s hard to discover from a search and it changes the calculus: an Indian-founded operation in the Maldives is a materially different proposition for an Indian first-timer than a European-run one. If you’ve been assuming the Maldives means a resort dive centre run by and for Europeans, that assumption is wrong, and it’s part of why the Maldives is more accessible from here than it looks.

Emperor, Red Sea, Egypt. August 2025, aboard the Emperor Elite. My first experience of a properly professional dive operation, and now the bar I measure others against. The specific thing they did that I did not enjoy at the time, and have been grateful for ever since, is in §5.

Orca, Mumbai. Researched A PADI 5-Star centre, running since 2008, founded by Anees Adenwala. Not a destination, and that’s the point. Azeem, their main instructor, did my confined-water training and has been on trips with me since; Anees, who owns it, is the source for the Lakshadweep recommendation above. They’re the people I call before I book anything.

And they don’t just teach. They organise. Orca put together my Similan trip, with Azeem along on the boat, and booked the Emperor liveaboard in the Red Sea for me. Both were arranged by Shameen there, and I’d single that out: booking either of those through her was straightforward and pleasant, which is not a low bar for international dive travel. That solves a problem I didn’t know I had: getting yourself from India onto an international liveaboard is fiddly. Foreign operators, foreign payment, certification paperwork, kit logistics, and no obvious way to tell a good boat from a bad one from a website. Having an Indian shop that has already vetted the boat and will handle the booking is worth a great deal more than the margin they make on it.

Which is the most transferable advice in this section: find a local dive shop and become a regular, before you need one. Not for the courses, but for the fact that when you’re deciding between two destinations, or wondering whether a piece of gear is worth it, or trying to work out if a liveaboard is above your level, you have someone who knows your diving and has no incentive to oversell you. Both of the second-hand recommendations on this page came from one shop. That’s not a coincidence, it’s the whole return on the relationship.

A thing I didn’t know was possible, and you should: you can split your Open Water certification. I did my confined-water (pool) sessions at home in India, and my open-water dives on the trip. That means fewer holiday days spent in a swimming pool, and it means the nervous part, the first time you breathe underwater, happens with an instructor you already know, close to home. Ask any local shop about a referral; it’s a standard arrangement and almost nobody mentions it to beginners.

The third one I’m not naming. My Similan liveaboard in December 2024 was fine, and I’m not putting a small operation on a public page over a single judgement call I disagreed with. That story is in §5 without a name attached.

Which is really the answer to “how do I choose a shop”

Three operators, three completely different cultures. One small and personal, built by friends who wanted to dive more, that taught me to be calm before it taught me to dive. One relaxed enough to work around a problem. One professional enough to end a dive rather than work around it.

None of those is objectively the best. Knowing which one you want is most of the decision, and that’s a question about you, not about them. It is also, I’d argue, a much better question than PADI-or-SSI.

4. What it actually costs

Course prices are the number everyone quotes and the smallest part of the real answer. Here is the honest shape of a first year, assuming you certify and then dive a bit.

Then the recurring costs: a two-tank day at most Indian sites, regulator servicing if you own regs, and dive accident insurance. Get the insurance. A chamber ride is not a number you want to discover empirically. DAN Asia-Pacific is the name everyone quotes, and it’s fine, but know this before you buy: liveaboards and some operators mandate a specific insurer and will check. Mine requires DiveAssure, bought through their own referral link with a copy emailed to them before departure. Check what your operator actually requires before you buy a policy, or you’ll end up holding two.

Rent or buy?

On economics alone, owning wins if you settle into one week-long trip a year: rental fees are a recurring cost against a one-off purchase, and it catches up before the gear wears out. But that isn’t a reason to buy now. What should stop you is that you don’t yet know what you want, and you can’t learn that from a website. Rent to buy yourself time, not to save money. The rental fees are tuition.

The order, when you do start: mask, fins, computer. Rent everything else. That’s Azeem’s, my instructor in Mumbai, and I’d pass it on unchanged. Mask because fit is individual and a leaking one ruins every dive; fins because they’re how you hold position, and rental fins are usually weaker, so you notice the extra effort in current; computer last of the three and least urgently, because rentals genuinely do the job and owning mainly buys you setting it up in advance and a continuous record of your own diving.

I’ve written the rest of this out properly on its own page: the four-step method I actually used, where each of my own decisions came from, the India-specific question about servicing that surprised me, and the mistake I made buying abroad. → How I Decide What Dive Gear to Buy

5. Where this takes you

The thing nobody tells you at the start: the certification is not the destination. It’s a passport. What you’re actually buying is access to a category of place you previously could not go.

A rough progression, in the order most people from India actually do it:

1. The proper trip: Andamans. Five to seven days, ten to fifteen dives, warm clear water and a healthy reef. This is where most people stop being someone who has done a course and start being someone who dives.

2. The step change: a liveaboard. You sleep on the boat. You wake up at a dive site, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, nap, night dive, sleep, repeat. Four days of that is fifteen-odd dives, which is more than most people log in two years, and diving that frequently, day after day, is when your buoyancy and air consumption suddenly click. The Similan Islands (Thailand, out of Khao Lak) is the standard first liveaboard, and the season is fixed by the national park: roughly 15 October to 15 May, closed the rest of the year. Book the dates before you book anything else. Egypt and the Red Sea belong on the same rung: the other standard first liveaboard, and often the better-value one from India.

   And the honest version, since the brochures won’t give it to you: living on a boat is not especially comfortable, and the food is decent rather than good. You take both because the quality of the diving, and the sites a boat can reach at all, are not available any other way. It is a straightforward trade and I would make it again, but go knowing it’s a trade, not a cruise.

The Red Sea: where the big thing happened

If the Similans taught me to look small, Egypt did the opposite.

The first thing you notice is the water itself. Thailand was green. Egypt was blue, a stark, immediate difference, and the visibility in Egypt was better too. I hadn’t expected two warm-water destinations to feel so unalike, and it’s worth knowing before you go that “tropical diving” is not one single thing.

Boat full of veterans, and me doing my Deep Diver specialty. At forty metres it was just my instructor Mustafa and me when six hammerheads appeared at the edge of visibility.

They came closer. Then they circled us, for twenty minutes.

There was no aggression in it whatsoever. They were curious, and so were we. I’d read somewhere that a hammerhead’s mouth is far too small to be any kind of threat to something person-sized, which is precisely the sort of fact you are extremely glad to be carrying when six of them are orbiting you at forty metres, and I was, genuinely, calm. Mustafa and I spent the entire time shouting into our regulators and pointing at each other: another one, behind you, there, there.

It is one of the most memorable twenty minutes of my life.

And here’s the part that belongs back in §2. I was only at forty metres because I had done the Deep specialty. The certification didn’t make me a better diver that day, but it put me somewhere I could not otherwise sensibly have been, at the exact moment six hammerheads decided to be curious. That is what certifications actually buy you. Access, not skill. Both are worth having; they are not the same thing.

The other thing Egypt gave me, which I enjoyed considerably less

I was diving with Emperor, on the Emperor Elite, in August 2025, and it was my first experience of a properly professional dive operation: safe, organised, unhurried, everything done properly and in order. It is the standard I’ve measured every operator against since.

That professionalism is also what caught me out. On Emperor, when I hit my reserve (50 bar, the standard “start heading back” pressure) the dive ended. Immediately, no negotiation. On my Similan liveaboard the same 50 bar had been handled by my simply taking the instructor’s alternate regulator and carrying on.

Nobody was in danger in either case, and that is exactly the point. Fifty bar isn’t an emergency. It’s a planned threshold, the number you’re taught to be on your way up at. But what an operation does when you hit a planned threshold tells you a great deal about how it will behave when something genuinely unplanned happens. One of them extended the dive by putting two divers on one tank. The other one ended it.

Having the dive taken away from me was by far the more useful of the two, because it forced me to confront a question I had been quietly avoiding: why am I hitting 50 bar so much sooner than everyone else on this boat?

And then the boat did something I still think about. Because my dive time kept getting cut short, Mahmoud, the captain, took me down on a dive of his own, just the two of us, no group, purely to watch me breathe and work out what I was doing wrong.

What he taught me I’m deliberately not writing down here. It’s a refinement to breathing that runs against what you’re taught in your open-water course. It is correct, and it is emphatically not something to take from a paragraph on a website written by someone who isn’t an instructor. It gets taught in the water, by a person watching you, at the point where you’re ready for it. Ask yours.

What I’ll say instead is what the moment meant. A working boat captain gave up a dive to fix one guest’s air consumption, and nobody asked him to. That is not a service standard anyone can put in a brochure. It’s what a professional outfit looks like when it doesn’t have to be, and it is most of why Emperor is the bar I hold others to.

That question, and Mahmoud’s answer to it, is the entire reason I now spend my time on trim and buoyancy instead of collecting more certifications. Air consumption is not really a lung-capacity thing or a fitness thing. It is mostly a position thing (a badly trimmed diver drags themselves through the water at an angle and pays for it in gas) and it is very fixable. But somebody has to make you look at it.

Which is the concrete answer to “why does the operator matter” in §2. Not comfort, not price. A good operation will stop you doing something and make you better; a relaxed one will smooth it over and you’ll never know.

3. The one you save for: Raja Ampat. West Papua, Indonesia. The highest recorded reef fish diversity anywhere on the planet. Season is roughly October to April, it’s expensive, and getting there is a genuine expedition: Jakarta or Makassar, then Sorong, then a boat. This is the “in a few years” trip, not the second one.

Similan

I went to the Similans in December 2024, wanting pelagics. Big animals, open water, the documentary shot. That was what I was looking for on every single dive, and it is fair to say I spent the first couple of them mildly disappointed.

The Similans made me look at small things instead. Everyone on that boat was obsessed with nudibranchs (sea slugs, most of them smaller than your thumb) and I did not understand the charm. Then, because everyone else was doing it, I started looking too. And it turned into a game: spot one before anybody else, work out what it was, point it out. I got completely hooked on a thing I’d been quietly dismissive of four days earlier.

There was also a turtle. Enormous, entirely unbothered by us, happy to just be looked at. I filmed it for as long as it would let me. Majestic isn’t a word I use often and it’s the right one.

What I’d take from that: arrive with an idea of what you want to see, then let the ocean overrule you. The dive that changes what you like is worth more than the one that confirms it.

Raja Ampat: the one I haven’t done yet

Still on the list. Which is, I think, the correct state for a diving list to be in.

6. Going alone

Here is the objection nobody puts in a dive guide, and it stopped me for six years.

I don’t have close friends who dive. Every trip I’ve taken except two (Australia, which was a family holiday where I did one dive, and one trip with my wife) has been solo. Three trips, alone, by choice only in the sense that the alternative was not going.

I think that is why the gap was six years and not two. I wasn’t waiting for money or nerve. I was waiting for somebody to want to come, and nobody did.

How it actually restarted

A friend told me about a guided meditation class at Tangerine Arts Studio in Bandra. I went. It was one of those sessions you come out of quiet and loose and slightly rearranged. And afterwards, while I was standing around not leaving, the teacher was talking to a few people about a dive trip she was running about a month later.

I signed up on the spot.

That was the whole mechanism by which six years of not-diving ended. I was in a room, for an unrelated reason, and something got mentioned. I would still be waiting if I’d held out for the version where a friend suggests it.

The practical answer, which is almost boring

On a liveaboard, they assign you a buddy. You turn up alone, the crew pairs you with someone, and you dive. It is completely normal, nobody thinks anything of it, and a meaningful share of the boat has done the same thing.

So the objection has a one-sentence answer. You don’t need a friend who dives. You need a booking.

Or don’t make it a dive trip at all

There’s a third option, and it’s the lowest-commitment version of everything on this page: add diving to a holiday you’re already taking.

Australia was a family holiday; I did one dive. The Maldives, years later, was a trip with my wife, who doesn’t dive. Both were short, a dive or two fitted around everything else that was happening, and both were completely worth doing. You get in the water, you see what the place actually has under it, and nobody has to rearrange their holiday around you.

And it’s worth noticing what that one dive in Australia did. It is the reason this page exists.

You do not need to commit to a dive trip to find out whether this is for you. You need one morning.

What you get instead

This is the part I didn’t expect and now rate most highly.

A dive boat puts you among people from wildly different countries, ages and walks of life who all care about one thing. That combination is rare as an adult, and it does something to conversation: you skip most of the preamble, because the shared thing is already established.

I had to make myself do it. Talking to strangers on a boat is outside my natural setting and I pushed at it deliberately, on the first trip and every one since. It has got easier and it has been worth it every time.

On Similan I ended up buddied with a stranger, and separately ran into school friends I hadn’t spoken to in over a decade, on a boat, in Thailand, by coincidence. In Egypt it properly landed: Symone and Natalie from Poland, a Thai group I spent most of the week with, and Noah and her family from Spain, who were a pleasure to be around. I’m still in touch with all of them, we’ve talked about doing a trip together, and I met up with the Thai friends again later in Bangkok.

That’s the honest state of it: I am still looking for a proper crew, people who’ll dive with me and want it as much as I do. I haven’t found them yet. I’m collecting them a boat at a time, and I’ve made peace with that being the method.

One more thing a boat did to me

Some of the people on that first trip were serious about the ocean in a way I wasn’t. They went back in repeatedly, on their own time, to pull rubbish out of the water. Not as an organised activity, just because it was there.

I run a business in ship recycling. Sitting on a boat watching people do that, I found myself thinking about what my own industry does to the sea, in a way I hadn’t from an office.

I’m not going to tell you a dive trip reformed a company. But it changed the questions I ask about my own work, and that’s not nothing.

7. If you get into the photography side

You will want a camera almost immediately. Wait.

The rule: don’t buy an underwater camera before about thirty dives. Not gatekeeping, physics. A camera in your hands is a camera in your hands, which means you are not managing your buoyancy. Before your buoyancy is automatic, holding a camera reliably produces three things: you sink onto and damage the reef, you burn through your air far faster, and your photos are bad anyway because you can’t hold still. Get your buoyancy sorted first and the photography becomes easy. Do it in the other order and you spend money to take worse pictures.

When you are ready, the path most people take:

• A GoPro first. Cheap, tough, probably already in your drawer. The thing to know: water absorbs red light first, so past about five metres everything goes blue-green and stays that way. A GoPro’s very wide lens is good for reef scenes and swimming-alongside-things, and bad for small subjects.
• A red filter is the highest-value thing you can add to it. It costs a fraction of any other accessory, and its sweet spot (blue tropical water, about 4.5–26 m) is exactly where most recreational diving happens. It works by subtracting blue at capture rather than adding light, so there’s no tray, no arms, no batteries and nothing new to hold. Confirm it fits your housing, not just the bare camera.
• Then a tough compact. The OM System (Olympus) TG-7 is the long-standing default. Researched Waterproof on its own, in a proper housing to real depth, and its close-focus macro mode is exceptional for the money. This is where most people who stick with it end up. I’m still on the GoPro.
• Then light, but know what you’re being sold. For close-up work a real light beats a better camera body, because the whole problem underwater is that the water ate your colour. A dive torch is not a video light, and shops will happily blur the two. A video light needs roughly a 100°+ beam at 4,000+ lumens; a primary dive torch is a narrow 6–12° spot. Pointing a torch at a video frame gives you a hotspot in the middle of a dark image. Adjustable torches marketed as doing both generally don’t; mine adjusts to 72° and is still nowhere near a video light. Buy the filter first; buy light when you actually know you need it.

8. FAQ, rapid fire

I wear glasses / contacts. Both fine. Soft contact lenses are what most people use; just close your eyes when clearing your mask, in case. If your prescription is strong, a mask with bonded corrective lenses is worth it and is not very expensive.

How young can kids start? Pool-based taster programmes from about 8. Junior Open Water from 10, with depth limits (roughly 12 m at 10–11, 21 m at 12–14) and a requirement to dive with a parent or a professional. Full adult certification at 15.

Sharks? Statistically a non-issue, and practically the opposite of the concern: most divers spend years hoping to see one and coming back disappointed. If you do see a reef shark, it will almost certainly be leaving. Mine turned up on my very first dive, which I now understand was luck rather than the norm, and the closest I have ever been to sharks, six hammerheads at forty metres in the Red Sea, involved twenty minutes of mutual curiosity and no aggression at all. That’s the honest shape of it: the animal you’re worried about is the one most divers are hoping to see.

My ears are a problem. Equalise early, gently, and often. Start before you feel anything, and repeat every metre or so on the way down. If it hurts, go up a metre and try again. Never force it, never push through pain, and never dive congested. This is the most common reason a dive gets cut short and it’s almost always managed by descending slower.

Am I fit enough? Almost certainly. The bar is a slow 200 m swim and a 10-minute float. The heaviest thing you’ll do is walk a few metres in a tank, usually with help.

Flying after diving? This one matters, so know it: the standard guidance is a minimum of 12 hours after a single no-decompression dive and 18 hours after multiple dives or several days of diving. The practical rule is to leave a full clear day between your last dive and your flight. This bites hardest on Andamans trips, where the journey home is a ferry to Port Blair and then a flight. Plan the last dive day accordingly, and don’t let a tight booking talk you into it.

Seasickness: what actually works? Most divers take something the night before and again in the morning, rather than when they already feel bad, because by then it’s too late. On the boat: stay outside on deck, look at the horizon, don’t read, and get in the water as soon as you can, because the symptoms usually vanish once you’re under. Two cautions: many motion-sickness tablets are sedating, and drowsy is a bad way to dive, so try any medication on land first, and check with your doctor before combining it with diving.

Do I need to buy gear to start? No. Every shop rents everything. Buy a mask; rent the rest for your first twenty dives at least.

Is it dangerous? Recreational diving within its limits is statistically safe, and the risks that exist are overwhelmingly procedural rather than random: ascending too fast, running low on air, or going beyond your training and conditions. All three are things you control. The unglamorous summary: divers who follow the rules they were taught have a very boring time getting hurt.

9. Why I actually do this

The honest answer isn’t in any of the sections above.

You go down hoping to see something specific. A particular fish, maybe something tiny you’ve read about, maybe something enormous. And often you don’t see it. You surface having not seen it, it is disappointing, and there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it. You are in an environment that does not arrange itself around you, and that is not a bug in the sport.

Which is exactly what makes the times you do see it feel different. Not “good.” Precious. The whole thing runs on patience and hope, and neither of those is a technique you can practise.

I picked up a phrase for this in Japan, sitting under the cherry blossoms: mono no aware. It translates roughly as the pathos of things: the quiet ache of knowing something is passing, and the way that knowing is inseparable from finding it beautiful in the first place. The blossoms are loved precisely because they last about a week. If they held, nobody would sit under them.

I think about that a lot underwater.

There’s a harder version of the same thought that I don’t think I can leave out. A good deal of what I’ve been lucky enough to see is not going to be there in the same form for the next generation. Some of these reefs are already not what they were twenty years ago. If you are getting to see something your children may not, that is a strange kind of privilege, and it changes how you look at it while you’re down there.

That’s not a reason to hurry. But it is a reason to go.

What this page deliberately doesn’t cover

Which of those destinations fits you. Whether the thing you’re actually nervous about is a real obstacle or just unfamiliarity. What to do about a specific medical condition. How to plan an actual trip on actual dates.

Those aren’t oversights. They’re the parts that are different for every person, and writing generic advice about them would be worse than writing nothing.

Message me

If you’re thinking about your first course, or you’ve got a trip in mind and want a second opinion on it, just message me. I’d rather have that conversation than have you make the expensive version of a decision from a web page. That includes the awkward questions, the ones about whether you’re too unfit, too old, too claustrophobic, or too bad a swimmer. The answer is usually no, and it’s a much better conversation than a paragraph.

Email: abhishek@terrak.ai LinkedIn: Abhishek Chaudhry

I read both. There’s no comments section here and there isn’t going to be one. Not to keep you out, but because a message means you actually wanted to talk, and that’s the conversation worth having.

What’s changed

• 21 August 2026. Cut the GoPro generation note from §7. Too far into the weeds for a page aimed at people deciding whether to learn at all. The red-filter advice that followed it now stands on its own rather than leaning on it.

• 21 August 2026. Dropped the first rung of the §5 progression. It was built around a specific close-to-home site, and once that came out of §3 it was the only place on the page still recommending it. The ladder now starts at the proper trip.

• 21 August 2026. Credited Shameen at Orca, who arranged both the Similan and Red Sea trips. Booking international dive travel from India is the fiddly part, and she made it straightforward. Worth naming rather than leaving as “the shop”.

• 21 August 2026. Trimmed §3. Dropped two destinations I wouldn’t send a beginner to, and the notes about pricing courses yourself. The section now says what it recommends and doesn’t spend words on what it doesn’t.

• 21 August 2026. Removed a stale note under the certification table. It explained why the figures in that table were ranges rather than prices, but the prices came out of the table earlier the same day, so it was answering a question the page no longer raised.

• 21 August 2026. Removed the budget hedging. The page kept gesturing at whether things were worth it on your budget, as though there were a cheaper version of this worth recommending. There isn’t. It now says once, near the top, that diving is expensive and stays expensive, and drops the subject. This page is maintained rather than published once. Everything that changes after it goes up gets listed here, including the things I got wrong.

• 21 August 2026. Split the gear material onto its own page. §4 was carrying a full method (buying order, where my decisions came from, servicing in India, buying abroad) inside a section that’s supposed to be about cost. It’s now its own page, and §4 keeps the short version.

• 21 August 2026. Added Mahmoud to §5. The captain of the boat in Egypt took me down on a dive of his own, just the two of us, to work out why my air was going so fast. He should have been in the section from the start. He’s most of the reason I rate that operation, and he’s the reason I now work on trim rather than collecting cards.

• 21 August 2026. Said the honest thing about liveaboards in §5. They’re not especially comfortable and the food is decent rather than good. You accept both because of where the boat can take you. Worth knowing before you book one rather than after.

• 21 August 2026. Added a third option to §6: diving on the side of a holiday you’re already taking. The section covered going alone but not the more common situation, where the people you holiday with don’t dive. Both my Australia and Maldives trips were that, and the single dive in Australia is the reason this page exists.

• 21 August 2026. Made the provenance labels an actual system. They were already there but phrased five different ways and easy to miss. Now there are four consistent tags (lived, reported, researched, and reasoned-but-not-yet-tested) with a note near the top explaining them, and I added labels to a few claims that were missing one.

• 21 August 2026. Reworked the season grid. Dropped two rows that were sitting beside real recommendations and muddling them. The Similans moved up into the learn-here block, where they belong: people treat them as a destination you graduate to, and they’re also a very good place to start.

• 21 August 2026. Added §9, “Why I actually do this.” The guide explained how to start and where to go without ever saying why it’s worth doing. Now it does: the patience, the disappointment when the thing you hoped for doesn’t turn up, and what that has to do with cherry blossoms. (Corrected shortly after posting: the concept I wanted is mono no aware, not wabi-sabi. Both concern impermanence, but wabi-sabi is an aesthetic of imperfection and weathering, while mono no aware is the feeling itself, and it’s the one that belongs to the blossoms.)

• 21 August 2026. Corrected two dates I’d got wrong. My first dive was July 2012, not 2011; I certified in December 2018, not April 2019. That makes the gap between them six years, where earlier versions of this page said eight and then seven. The whole point of §6 rests on that number, so it’s worth stating plainly that I had it wrong twice before checking a record.

• 21 August 2026. Separated out two destinations that were implying more than I know. They were listed beside places I’d actually send you to, and I haven’t dived either. Later removed altogether.

• 21 August 2026. Removed every price. Course fees, gear costs, trip totals, all of it. Dive pricing moves with the season, the operator and the exchange rate, and a confidently stale number is worse than no number because you’d plan around it. Prices now point at PADI, SSI and the shops directly.

• 21 August 2026. Published.