Diving: €600 of gear and no sharks to fear

Diving for €600: sharks are the least of your problems

Someone who lives ten kilometres from the coast starts doing the math. On one hand, fishing among the rocks with a €60 kit. On the other, an action camera and a tank to photograph schools of fish, with a minimum outlay of €600. Before deciding, the aspiring diver draws up a list of dangers: dangerous Mediterranean species, decompression, hitting rocks on exit, tangling with algae and sharks. Someone who has spent years underwater replies with a different list, and a far less cinematic one.

How much does it really cost to start diving?

The €600 range makes the veterans laugh. One of them estimates that with wetsuit, tank, BCD and stages, the realistic figure is closer to €1,000, and that's without the course. Getting certified at a beach school costs around €250, with permission to descend to 18 metres: not much horizontally, almost a building vertically. The cheapest 5-litre tank mentioned in the conversation costs €168 and can even be financed in instalments. Annual insurance runs between €30 and €50, an expense nobody disputes.

There is one item almost nobody includes in the initial budget, and which the most experienced put first: the dive computer. €160 on average, less second-hand. It's not a tech whim. It's what warns you about depth, exposure time and when you're entering deco. Diving blind with a tank is like signing a blank cheque.

Are there dangerous sharks in the Mediterranean?

The answer several divers in the thread give is short: not near the coast. The blue shark and the mako are pelagic, they chase tuna in open sea and only appear close if a current pushes a sick specimen in. What lives in shallow areas are small sharks — catsharks, thresher sharks — incapable of doing more damage than a little finger. Some participants attribute the panic to the Jaws film saga, which in their view still works as a zoology manual for many people.

The real risk has no gills. It has a motor.

The dangers that don't make it into documentaries

One participant sums up the most frequently cited enemy: recreational boats that can't tell a dive flag from a supermarket sign. Anchors dropped without looking. Jet skis speeding over a submerged head. That explains why many won't go into the water without a knife strapped to their leg. Not to fight fauna, but to cut someone else's anchor line or get out of an abandoned net.

Lost nets and longlines are a recurring threat in busy areas. Add to that algae, sea urchins — some report spines embedded for over a year — and rocky exits, which are solved with gloves and boots rather than courage. The repeated recommendation: enter and exit from the beach, not from the rocks.

Ears and pressure: the risk that is real

Here the conversation gets serious. Ear barotrauma appears among the injuries cited, and some have had multiple eardrum surgeries. Exostosis also comes up, a bone growth in the ear canal associated with cold that, according to the cases described, can end up closing the channel. One participant maintains it's common among divers and rarely requires more than monitoring; another recounts the case of an acquaintance who lost hearing. Both versions coexist in the same thread without anyone settling it.

What no position disputes is decompression. Ascending faster than your own bubbles forces stops at shallow depths, and skipping them leads to the hyperbaric chamber. The dive computer, again, is the instrument that sets the limit. One participant describes surviving a sudden decompression at 210 metres, with his heart pounding against his ribcage, as the sole survivor of five people in a chamber. That's 22 atmospheres released at once. The story isn't meant to set an example.

Why do they insist so much on not diving alone?

Because the sea gives no warning. Someone who has spent years practising open-water swimming and diving sums it up without drama: he has never suffered a serious accident he couldn't get out of on his own, and precisely for that reason he insists on not going alone no matter how well he knows the area. Experience isn't measured in dives, it's measured in available margin for error.

In the end, the aspiring diver who peine the conversation is clear: the law keeps a close eye on him, cheap gear is still expensive, and the list of dangers he brought from home has run out of sharks. The real bill isn't settled by antiestéticar. It's settled by the €160 computer that decides when to stop ascending.