Dive 2

Or

What happened.

I met Claire a month before dad died. They never got to meet. I think they would have liked each other.

Claire had learnt to dive when she lived in Dubai with her previous boyfriend Seamus (pronounced Shay-mus by us but pronounced by the Arabs as Sea-mouse). She did it to fill the time. She’d had a job and been sacked and getting another in Dubai wasn’t easy. She didn’t realise what a rufty-tufty (well…moderately dangerous) sport it was. She probably never would have done it if she had.

Anyway, I joined my local diving club with the intention of diving with Claire. Friday night at 7.30 we would meet up for club meetings and lectures. The meetings were held in the civic hall, the lectures in the executive conference suite (a freezing cold shed out the back). At 9pm we would shuffle off to the pool; old, cold, and full of plasters (oh! And hair. Lots of hair). This was the salubrious surroundings of St. Mary’s swimming pool, belonging to that esteemed girls boarding school and, believe it or not, the inspiration for St. Trinian’s. That’ll give you an idea of the standard of the facilities.

At 10pm, having successfully not drowned whilst deliberately filling our masks with water (only to then clear them by blowing out through the nose and filling said mask with snot)  and throwing away our DVs (demand valves – the bit you actually breathe through) we’d tootle off to the pub.

After several months of this we were ready for our first open water dive. It was then that I discovered that Claire wasn’t too keen on diving in British waters. Too cold, too dark, too little viz (dive slang for ‘visibility’) i.e. you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face half the time, and the other half you wouldn’t want to anyway. Nothing to see in British waters.

But I was committed (or should have been – What was I doing??) at least financially. I’d spent a not inconsiderable sum on a semi dry suit (posher than a wet suit, not as posh as a dry suit), mask, fins, BCD (buoyancy control device ie a special jacket that acts like the swim bladder in a fish), regulator (for air) and tanks (err….for air), blobs (technical term for SMB – Surface Marker Buoy - diving has a whole wonderful language all of its own).

My first open water dive was at The Ferryboat Inn (Yeah! I know. A pub) in Weymouth. It’s where the lagoon behind Chesil Beach meets the sea. There’s a bridge now. There’s no ferry anymore. But the pub’s still there. It’s very sheltered (the water, not the pub). I remember seeing lots of weed, a sandy bottom and a pipe fish (a relative of the seahorse) before crawling exhausted out of the water with way too much weight on my belt and being hardly able to stand the kit weighed that much. Diving is quite a good way to build muscle. There’s a lot of heavy lifting involved. Oh! And it’s far from glamorous. In real life no one ever got out of the sea looking like Sean Connery or Ursula Andress. There’s just too much snot involved (See part one and don’t ask anymore. Oh! Alright. Diving squeezes your body. This includes the sinuses. Need I go on). And then there’s the sea sickness. I’d heard the phrase ‘looking a little green about the gills’ but never actually seen anyone actually looking actually green before I actually went diving. Not pleasant.

Thus began my diving career. I’d bugger off to Skomer in West Wales, or the Farne Islands in Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Weymouth or anywhere on the South Coast west of Portland (the ground is rockier so there’s less silt so the viz is better). Claire would stay at home and decorate. After the first year she got fed up of this and decided to tag along. I’d get in the RIB (a boat with a sodding gurt engine on the back) and go diving for the day, leaving Claire to wave goodbye from the quayside (how romantic). Actually what she was doing was working herself up to trying British diving by watching me go off for the day and then come back with tales of what I’d seen and done. This would make her jealous and want to have a go. It worked too.

We were in the Farnes. Claire still hadn’t been in the water although we had dived together on holidays to Dubai and The Maldives. She borrowed some kit and one morning came out with us on the boat. After the rest of us had dived Claire was going to jump in and try it out for a few minutes. The first thing she saw when she got in the water was the speciality of the Farnes. A grey seal; lithe and graceful in the water. And rather friendly as well. They come up to you and nibble your fins, play with your blob as it shoots to the surface and on the whole hang around wondering what these noisy, ungainly creatures are that have invaded their space. It’s magic. Claire was hooked.

After that we dived all over the place, either for long (and not so long) weekends around the south and even for week long holidays to Scotland, the Canary Islands and the Red Sea. It was quite handy living in the middle of the country miles from the sea. It meant you could go anywhere relatively easily. The nearest bit of coast was about an hour away. The furthest (for a weekend) 3 or 4 hours away. The downside is that you can’t dive every day like those clubs on the coast, but they tend to dive the same stuff all the time. We had a great variety to choose from.

For the first few years I loved every minute of it, but as ever, things change and the ‘been there, done that’ attitude starts. The second dive of the day became increasingly boring. After an adventurous dive in the morning, often quite deep and on a wreck, the afternoon’s dive was usually a reef dive. The ‘reef’ usually consisted of a few seaweed covered boulders strewn across the seabed. I became blasé about it all and tired of seeing the same few boulders with the same bits of seaweed stuck to them every afternoon. Sad really, when you consider how magical it is under the water.

And then the effort to get that good morning dive became rather onerous too. To save money and ensure we could do more dives Claire and I would camp. Now I enjoy camping and I enjoy diving but camping and diving? It’s just too much like hard work. Getting all the kit together (both diving and camping kit was err….substantial) took a day. After a long drive we would have to erect the tent and set up home, which was fine. It was just that, after a day of diving, you would return to a cold tent cold and tired and then have to wander over to the shower block to get clean and warm before preparing dinner. B&Bs are, generally, warm, cosy places. Not so a tent. It took another day to sort everything out when we got home.

And so what had been a joyful experience became a tiresome one. That and another visit to the Deep Dark Pit® stopped my diving. The pressure of water at depth and anti-depressants don’t mix. Apparently they can do weird things to you so I had to stop. Also I got worked up by the other personalities and the politics within the club and just as with other pastimes, a pattern set in and the joy disappeared.

Circumstances have now moved on. Jobs have changed and we can no longer afford to go diving. Mind you I’m still on the old anti-barking tablets so I couldn’t dive even if I wanted to. However, I do miss diving now and again.