Getting Your Sea Legs

By Yvette Cardozo and Bill Hirsch

Scuba divers with disabilities have been visiting reefs for decades. But, until recently, getting to the water was sometimes harder than getting around in it. These days, though, it’s gotten a little easier.

There are more accessible hotels and, even more important for the diehard diver, there are now accessible, live-aboard dive boats.

Don’t laugh, but many divers find land-based resorts -- well, distracting. When the live-aboard company Aggressor Fleet Ltd. of Louisiana, U.S.A., coined the phrase, "Eat! Sleep! Dive!", it zeroed right into the heart of the scuba experience for avid divers.

On a typical live-aboard, if you’re not diving, you’re getting ready to dive, or eating brownies after a dive. The best live-aboards have tanks stowed permanently in racks so that all a diver has to do is shrug into his or her gear and fall overboard. No hauling heavy stuff. No dragging masks and fins back and forth.

If this is helpful for people without disabilities, it’s a miracle of convenience for divers with disabilities. But more than permanent tank stowage is needed to make a live-aboard truly accessible.

The development of the two accessible Aggressor boats started when John Lawson, who became a PADI-certified dive instructor as an upper-extremity double amputee, showed up to dive aboard Dan Ruth’s Kona Aggressor live-aboard in Hawaii.

"We started talking, and I said I’d really like to get involved in diving for people with disabilities," Ruth says. "We followed up on this and John, along with three other divers from the Handicapped Scuba Association (HSA), served as consultants."

First, Ruth retrofitted his Kona boat.

"We put in an incline lift from the dive deck to the upper deck," he says. "We widened the doorways to one stateroom, and replaced doorknobs with levers. We took out the bathroom door and replaced it with a curtain, and installed a Euro-style shower with an adjustable head that slides up and down. And we made the toilet on the dive deck totally accessible."

But that was just playing catch-up.

"The Fiji boat is the first barrier-free, live-aboard dive boat in the world planned from the ground up and built with disability in mind," Ruth declares.

Some of the "goodies" were intentional accommodations. Others just came as part of the boat’s catamaran design package.

Top on the list of catamaran advantages is space. The Fiji Aggressor is 105 feet long and 30 feet wide (compared to perhaps only 22 feet for a standard hull boat).

"Not only does this mean the rooms are larger, it means they’re all above waterline. So everything below is dedicated to machinery space, which gives room for some great systems," says Capt. Troy Parker of the Fiji boat.

Each stateroom has individual climate control (a big plus for someone whose body temperature might not be as adaptable as the next person’s).

Both the main live-aboard and the auxiliary dive skiff have water-jet propulsion systems instead of propellers. "We’ve got incredible manoeuvrability," says Parker. "We can sit 30 yards off a dock and walk the boat in sideways." For the dive skiff, such manoeuvrability means being able to turn literally on a dime and slide quickly up to a diver who has mobility.

The main boat also has a hydraulic lift which raises the dive skiff to the level of the dive deck. For crew, this means tanks can be filled as they sit on the skiff. For divers without disabilities, it means the convenience of having the skiff on the same level as their dive gear storage. And for those with disabilities, this enormously simplifies getting from the main boat into the skiff.

All of this before you even get into the features designed specifically with accommodating disabilities in mind. These include an elevator that can accommodate a wheelchair user getting from dive deck to living deck, and a wider hallway between staterooms in the living area. They also include totally wheelchair-accessible rooms, with wide doors into both the stateroom and the bathroom, flat access to the bathroom, a seat in the shower, an adjustable shower head, grab rails in the shower and around the toilet, and levels instead of doorknobs.

Meanwhile, land-based resorts are also courting divers with disabilities. And often, says Jim Gatacre, founder of the Handicapped Scuba Association in the United States, accessibility is a lot easier than people think. "I’ve been to hotels that think they have three accessible rooms, and actually they’ve got 100."

The HSA uses a star rating to indicate how accessible a facility is. "Five stars... totally accessible... means a wheelchair user can use all the facilities without assistance, can use everything in the room, can go to the restaurant, the bar, the pool, over to the stores and the pier."

Among the handful of totally accessible dive resorts, he says, are the Divi Flamingo Beach in Bonaire, the Divi Tiara Beach in Cayman Brac, King Kamehameha in Korna on Hawaii’s Big Island, the Hyatt in Aruba, and Hawks Cay on Duck Key in the Florida Keys.

Gatacre helps certify divers with all types of disabilities. "We’ve trained and certified people who were C3 quads with only the use of their neck and head. The key is, they have assistants.

If a person can’t help another diver in distress, he is considered a B-level diver. A B-level diver dives with two buddies... someone to help him, and someone to assist the helper if he needs help."

A diver who is blind, for instance, may be able to move around without assistance but may need guidance. A person who is paraplegic often only needs help getting in and out of the water. Some divers with disabilities use webbed gloves on their hands for propulsion.

Julia Dorsett, who publishes the HSA journal, has paraplegia. She explains, "I have full trunk, which is a big deal because it gives me full balance. So I just get up, have breakfast and get out a bit early because I wear a five-mil wetsuit. My suit has zippers on the legs so it’s easier to get my legs in and out. I do a forward-roll entry into the water and, to get out, I turn around backward, get my arms around the ladder and scoot up on my butt. Or, if it’s a regular dive boat, I turn around backward and someone grabs me under the arms and pulls me in. I propel myself with my arms. I don’t use the webbed gloves unless there’s a current, because I want to be able to feel things."

For someone with quadriplegia, Gatacre says, you may need someone to help with most aspects: gear, mobility, buoyancy control and even little things like pinching your nose to clear your ears. "To get around, the buddy grabs your first stage and guides you that way.

We get a lot of high injuries, a lot of people paralyzed from the chest down," Gatacre continues. "Other sports, like wheelchair tennis, aren’t as rewarding for them because they can’t reach over [their shoulders]. But underwater, they have a lot of freedom."

Dorsett totally agrees with the freedom which scuba offers. She says scuba is "one of the few sports that lets you truly feel whole again."

(Yvette Cardozo and Bill Hirsch are a husband-and-wife writing/photography team specializing in adventure travel. They live in Issaquah, Washington, U.S.A.)

RESOURCES:

Handicapped Scuba Association (HSA) International
1104 El Prado
San Clemente, CA
92672 U.S.A.
Phone: (714) 498-6128

Club Challenge, Water Sports for the Physically Challenged
38 Orchard View Blvd., Ste. 807
Toronto, ON
M4R 2G3
Phone: (416) 485-7355
Fax: (416) 485-7547
E-mail: gnford@sympatico.ca

Aggressor Fleet, Ltd.
P.O. Box 1470
Morgan City, LA
70381 U.S.A.
Toll-free: 1-800-348-2628
Fax: (504) 384-0817
E-mail: divboat@aol.com
Website: http://www.aggressor.com