Learning to Dive

Some friends of ours with real money rented a house in Nantucket for two weeks and invited us for a long weekend. The house was spectacular and had a nice pool. My daughters are both fish, so it was pretty clear the weekend would be mainly spent in the pool.

But neither of my daughters can dive. Danielle, now 11, learned to swim very well, but always had a mental block with diving. Tori is just 7, so plenty of time for her to learn it.

The problem is that I never knew how to dive. I didn’t grow up around swimming pools, we went camping and I swam in lakes. Not a lot of diving boards.

I taught myself to at least dive from the edge of a swimming pool, just to encourage Danielle, but a diving board turns me into a dangerous belly flop machine.

This pool had a small diving board about 2 feet above the water. Pretty tame. The first day I told Danielle, “three days in a pool, be a shame to not learn to dive”.

Day 1, she’s thinking about it. Day 2 she practices diving from the edge of the pool and gets pretty comfortable. So day 3 she decides to give the board a shot. Of course she wants me to try as well. And she comes up with the best way to start (at least for us). Just walk the board to the end, don’t stop, just dive. Don’t give yourself any time to think about it.

And it worked. Suddenly we’re both diving. An hour later, we’re getting some air, going for distance, big fun. (I have video of this, but I’ve been expressly forbidden to share it.)

So this will be forever remembered as the weekend Danielle (and I) learned to dive.