Why Diving?

             Discussing our reasons for moving to Hurghada, someone asked,” why do you like diving so much then?” I’d said something trite about fish and coral, but it started me thinking.

Growing up I’d maintained a mixed relationship with pools and seas. I enjoyed swimming but never strayed far out of my depth. I was 45 years young, when Liz and I were strolling along a marina quayside in Turkey. That morning I’d forgotten to cast the entrails of a baby goat across our courtyard. I didn’t therefore realise the propitious alignment of the planets with the divine pipeline of fortune was steeping us in the nectar of destiny. How else do you explain our incredible luck that day?

We sauntered past a dozen unoccupied dive boats moored stern on to the dock and Liz was telling me that she’d always wanted to dive but is an allergy asthmatic, sensitive to horses, dogs, feathers and cats and believed she would never dive. A blackboard propped against one gangplank advertised trial dives and someone was working on deck. “Ask”, I said, “you have to ask.” Liz attracted the attention of the silhouetted figure who beckoned her aboard. 

Since that day, I have heard many stories from people whose first or early experience have been at the hands of total idiots. Incompetents that converted potential intelligent, able and willing lifetime fanatics into confirmed scuba-phobics. One lad told me he’d run out of air on his trial dive with no one around to help, a girl said that she was wrenched around the pool like a piece of dirty washing being vigorously cleansed, and another, that on his first open water dive the instructor mislaid him. How many are lost to our sport because dive centres aren’t sufficiently diligent? 

Liz came ashore. “Wednesday,” she said. “We’re going Wednesday.”  The radiance of her enthusiasm temporarily outshone the searing afternoon sun. “Allison says there are no dogs or cats down there and all the horses are really small, so where’s the problem?” May I enter a plea; if you are going to give advice, stick to stuff you know. Liz spent the best part of half a century not doing something she now loves, (almost more than yours truly!) because no one admitted they didn’t know enough to give the advice they gave. In 1637 Balthasar Gracian (a Jesuit priest) wrote, “to seek advice does not lessen greatness or argue incapacity. On the contrary, to ask advice proves you well advised.” Wisdom nearly half as aged as a millennium, ignored still. Will we ever learn? 

It’s a funny thing this life business. Liz is, I am certain, and perhaps one day DNA will prove she is part fish. An occasional professional sailor, a windsurfer, and a youth county swimmer and high board diver, water holds no fears for her. You would expect then, the odds were stacked in her favour. We jumped off the boat, our first giant stride, and prepared to push the down button on our BCD’s. That was the moment when, if Liz’s mentor had been anyone but Alison we might easily have joined the ranks of the never-again brigade. For a few minutes, the mask and regulator reminded Liz of an oxygen mask forced onto her face after being too long in a room with a hairy Labrador. A combination of Alison’s calm reassurance and Liz’s stubborn determination won the day and she disappeared below the waves, her first dive. Hundreds have followed. I experienced no problems, went straight down and swam around without a second thought. Alison we later discovered was a PADI course director. If Liz had chanced upon a lesser mortal, would they have been wise enough to give the correct advice? Your lordships, I rest my case on our good fortune that day. How often does a novice get counsel from and a trial dive with one of Poseidon’s Princesses?

For the next year, we were working ridiculous hours running a pub. We needed a break and managed to get a week away at the end of November, to recharge for the Christmas rush. I didn’t pay much attention to the booking; we flew into Sharm to discover Taba Heights was 130 miles and 4 hours by road from the airport. We arrived exhausted from the trip and many months of long days and short nights. My one memory of the hotel involves a seven-foot spotty dog singing the Birdie Song, in German, at a decibel level threatening the structural integrity of the building.  

The following morning we registered at the dive centre and for the first time filled in one of PADI’s medical forms. I wondered then, and wonder now, how effective is this process? I’d hurt my back dragging a barrel out of the cellar and answered the relevant question with a “yes.” For a while, they weren’t going to allow me to dive but eventually ripped up the form. I filled in another one, ticking “no” to every question. It clears the dive centre of any responsibility of course, and gives the client the opportunity for second thoughts, should they have one of the more serious conditions, but is widely flouted. A necessity in our litigious world, or an unwelcome manifestation of our risk averse culture doing its best to prevent fun? 

For Liz, who wanted to fly though the course and get at least one days diving in as a qualified diver I was the pupil from hell. My success in Turkey evaporated in a fug of fingers and thumbs. I couldn’t get the hang of anything practical. Our instructor, Eric, had spent the best part of an hour trying to get me to clear my mask, a skill I refused to master. Eventually I stormed out of the water, pulled my kit off and threw it onto the pebbles. “I’ve spent millions of years evolving out of the bloody stuff, why the ***** do I want to go back in?” I muttered as I made for a nearby beer seller. Liz and Eric persevered, the course ran into five days, and as we didn’t complete all the required dives, qualified as Scuba, rather than Open Water Divers.  

My excuses were; one, I was knackered from the pub and should have spent a few days doing nothing before launching into the course, two, the kit the dive centre hired me was uncomfortable, verging on unsuitable, something I didn’t then have the experience to fully appreciate, three: I am rubbish at such things anyway.  

May next year and Liz hadn’t given up hope. This time we were going to Eilat in Israel. Liz had taken charge, researched and found a dive instructor to cure my lumbering ineptitude and turn me on to the pleasures of the sport. They hatched a plot, these two water-holics. I was two tug piloted through the rest of the training to become an open water diver. Liz then bought me an underwater camera. It worked. I forgot that I didn’t like diving, ignored a book advising that I log at least fifty dives before touching a housing and was as happy as a porcine quadruped in mire.  

Since then we’ve logged hundreds of dives and illegally managed a dive centre in a Thai island resort. Illegally, because we didn’t have work permits and are not qualified instructors or even divemasters. This didn’t seem to matter and they even offered instructor certification without putting us through the course. We spent five amazing months diving several times a day, commuting by speedboat and living on a tropical island. We left only because the owners constantly reneged on promises to supply medical oxygen.  

Why do I like diving? Because I can do it. After decades of mild hydrophobia I can now put on the kit, wade out into the surf, and without a second thought plunge under the waves. Because I find myself rising and falling over coral outcrops without effort, because I get to backflip off ribs, without apprehension and because it’s the nearest I’m going to get to flying. Oh, yes and there’s the fish, in all their unlikely colours and shapes, the kaleidoscopic corals, and the turtles, and once an oceanic white tipped shark.  

It’s mad down there, translucent pipefish, inquisitive giant Napoleon fish, teeny-weenie Basslets, camouflaged crocodile fish, corals in fire pink, and vibrant orange, and the random choreography of life busy feeding, avoiding becoming food, reproducing and accidentally putting on a dazzling spectacular that the lucky scubarist can leisurely absorb. It’s an alien world, hostile and bizarre. Until you’ve done it, you can’t know what you are missing, and to miss it would be a criminal act.