My wife and I have been open water certified about 10 years, but our dedication to scuba has been a little off and on, partly due to the overhead involved as compared to skin diving.

Inspired by some on this forum, we rented tanks and gear for the first time and have done our first dives on our own.

I'm not a pilot, but I imagine that soloing the first time feels a little like this - a huge leap in responsibility! No divemaster, crew left on the boat, O2, etc. Accordingly, we are confining ourselves to the simplest of dives, preferably places we already know well. So far we dived Sandy Ledges, Diamond Reef, and at the Indians twice.

The biggest challenges so far have been navigation and communication. I'm well familiar with compass navigation on land, but underwater between maintaining depth, monitoring air and trying to keep a compass course has me feeling like I'm frantically juggling my instruments the entire time.

Adapting communication is also a challenge because the dynamics are different. It's so tempting to ask questions like: do you want to go around one more time or go back? These are difficult to communicate. The threshhold for wanting to communicate a minor difficulty or discomfort is also lower. We need to work on our underwater vocabulary.

Diving on our own has also given us a heightened appreciation for the comparative ease of guided dives, so we have done a bunch of those too: several 2-tank dives with SCD, a 1 tank dive with Sunchaser and we have another 2-tank outing to the Invisibles planned for tomorrow.

This trip has really re-ignited our enthusiasm for diving, and we hope to return with our own gear next time and rent only the tanks.