This Ennis, Texas based diving school offers both newbies and advanced divers the training they need to become underwater explorers.
Almost 75% of the Earth is underwater, and teaching local adventurers the skills they need to explore the part of the planet where the fishes live is Ennis Scuba Diving LLC.
From novices who’ve yet to get their feet wet to advanced divers who want to expand on their skills, the school offers everything needed become a certified scuba diver.
“Scuba diving is where where we take you into the underwater world to experience what the majority of our Earth has to offer,” says Ennis Scuba Diving founder and longtime Ennis Police Officer David Dodd. “Of course, we have to take air with us because we don’t have gills, so we take air with us in scuba tanks, and we access that air through a regulator. So, with those two pieces of equipment, plus the other pieces of equipment that accompany that, it allows us to safely experience what what this world has to offer.”
David says what divers can look forward to seeing is everything from the fishes, amphibians and wide variety of aquatic life that live beneath the waves to sunken ships and planes — oh, and there are sharks.
“Obviously, when you go offshore, you’ll see what the ocean has to offer, which is everything from soft to hard corals, shipwrecks, and just an abundance of sea life. Ennis Scuba Diving has a sister business called Texas Shark Diving and Conservation, and we travel around and work with different species of sharks. And so a lot of the students that come to us have have found us through that. And so their interest is sharks and large animals of that nature,” he says.
The short classroom portion of the scuba diving training is completed through an online course, then David and his son Will take students to a nearby swimming pool to learn the basics of scuba equipment and how to stay underwater safely.
David Dodd and Will Dodd with Ennis Scuba Diving in Ennis, Texas.
“We’ll learn about assembling equipment and how to utilize the equipment; so, that takes about eight hours. And then once they’re completed with that, then we take them out to one of the surrounding lakes where we’ve got some decent visibility,” David says. “Terrell has a scuba park there; Athens has a scuba park, and we sometimes use the Wheeler Branch Reservoir out at Glen Rose where we spend two days, during which the student will will demonstrate their ability to perform those skills for the instructor. They learn everything they need to become a safe scuba diver.”
David says the full class can take about a month to complete, mostly because students tend to be available only on the weekends, but he’s helped some students get their last-minute certification in just a couple of weeks before going on a trip. The end result of the basic training is open water certification, which allows divers to descend down to 60 feet deep.
“Getting certified allows you to be able to purchase dive equipment — to be able to get and rent dive equipment and air. Nobody will fill your air tanks — nobody will rent you an air tank for diving unless you’re certified,” David adds.
For anyone curious about diving but who’s not ready to take the full plunge, Ennis Scuba Diving also offers a Discover Scuba session which involves a brief 20-minute presentation followed by two hours in a pool where instructors acquaint participants with scuba basics. David says the discovery sessions are especially popular among dating couples.
“Sometimes they’ll do the Discover Scuba just to reassure themselves that they’re going to be okay to do it. I’ve had some people that, them and their wives or them and their dates or whatever want to do something different for the day, and so they go out and do something different,” he says.
Ennis Scuba Diving LLC is a family-owned business started by David and his son Will, who’s an assistant in the dive master program, and his other son Steven, who still dives but has moved out of state. Beyond discovery classes and basic open water certification, the school offers advanced open water courses and specialty training in wreck diving, dive propulsion vehicle operation and search-and-recovery work.
David began scuba diving in February 2000 and has logged over 2,000 dives in both fresh water and salt water environments since then. He has experience in numerous areas of diving but spends most of his personal diving time photographing, documenting and reporting shark activity and behavior as part of a shark conservation effort. He is also a Public Safety Recovery Diver and Instructor and has worked with several North Texas dive teams.
David says he initially started Ennis Scuba Diving as an activity for local youth — Ennis is a town that needs more offerings for teens and young adults to enjoy — but the school has since drawn a mostly older crowd with a diverse interest in diving.
“Some people are interested in nature. Some people are interested in conservation. Some people are looking for a reasonably relaxing sport that they can enjoy during different times of the year. Because scuba diving is not just a summer activity, people find some of the best diving is in colder water and in colder temperatures — water clarity and animal life changes depending on the times of the year. Some people are looking for an exciting adventure, and so they can find that through scuba diving. Scuba diving is one of the one of the types of sports that you can find just about anything that you’re looking for. It can be relaxing. It can be exciting. If you get into caves and caverns and stuff like that, diving can be very adventurous as far as going out and seeking out areas that haven’t been scouted out by other people before,” David says. “Most of the students that I’ve got are coming through probably in their mid 20s to early 30s on up into their 50s.”
See the Ennis Scuba Diving LLC listing for contact information.