My first experience of diving!

Me and Oli all good underwater!



 “I can breathe!” This is the first thing that I thought as I crouched down under the water. Maybe not a particularly profound thought, but still, it is a cool feeling looking up at the water’s surface and sucking in oxygen at the same time…

This was my first ever diving experience! It is something that I have wanted to do for a long time, despite how scary it is. For this adventure I managed to rope in my best friend Oli, who was also really looking forward to it! She is going travelling with her other half soon (Sob! I’ll miss her!), and hopes to do some diving, so it was great for her to try it out. We were joined by a Father and Son who were doing the Try Dive as a combined birthday present for them both. The session began with quite possibly the longest safety briefing I have ever listened to in the history of safety briefings! Even though I was itching to get in the water and get started, I was impressed at how thorough this was. We got a chance to ask any questions about things we didn’t understand or that worried us, and everything was explained well. The most important thing, as the instructor explained to us, was that you cannot hold your breath when you are breathing compressed air. It’s because your lungs expand as you come up from depth to the surface, and if they are already full of air they have the potential to overinflate (sounds similar to anaesthetic barotrauma in veterinary medicine). Scary stuff!

After the briefing we went through and got kitted up in all the gear, including a short wetsuit, face mask, flippers and our vests with the air attached. There were several things to learn here. A fun thing was that the vest can fill with air or release it, in order to buoy you up or allow you to sink with the weights in the vest. There is a button for each (Ooh, a button!), so I had myself a fun few minutes sending myself up and down in the water! There is also an air mouthpiece with a button (Oo…no, I think it’s probably only funny once) to clear water from it, which makes an almighty noise! As well as this you have a mask on your face which encompasses your eyes and nose. It feels very odd at first not being able to breathe through your nose as normal. But once you are underwater it is obviously better! We were also told that you have to equalise the pressure on the ears regularly as you go to depth by holding the nose and blowing out. It wasn’t too bad as we were only going to be swimming at a maximum depth of 1.8 metres in the swimming pool. But in a deeper environment you are supposed to do it often as you descend. The next thing to learn was the famous diver hand signals. We all know the ‘Ok’ signal (used as a question or a confirmation depending on the context), but there is so much more to learn! This includes the signals for ‘Not Ok’ (a wibbley hand), ‘Kneel’, ‘Follow Me’, ‘Let’s Go Up’ and more! It was great fun learning and using these hand signals.



Getting ready to start

With all this learnin’ on board, it was finally time to try it out! This was when I got my first experience of how utterly weird it is to breathe underwater. We all had to take some air out of our vests and kneel on the bottom (harder than it sounds with flippers attached!), and then Jon gave us each an ‘Ok’ signal, which we responded to. Then we had to press out button to get rid of any water clogging up the mouthpiece for the air (this probably has a proper name, but it eludes me right at this moment).

The ‘Follow Me’ signal came from the instructor, and then we weren’t just sitting underwater sucking compressed air; we were swimming at the same time! Swimming with flippers is really bloody difficult when you consider that you might accidentally kick someone in the face with the business end by accident. Then there’s the technique of it. You’re supposed to rhythmically stroke each leg up and down and fold your arms in front of you to glide forward. I did an awkward, jerky ‘frog’s legs’ motion forward and shimmied my arms like a failing attempt at hoola hooping. Amazingly enough, this actually did work, at least partially. I started going forward. All the time, I was trying to remember ‘Don’t hold your breath, don’t hold your breath, don’t hold your breath’. After breathing the compressed air for a while, it doesn’t half make your throat dry.

Swimming through hoops!

We crawled along the bottom of the pool (I don’t think we were meant to be crawling, but it takes some time to get the buoyancy of the jacket right), and down to the deep end. I had to equalise my ears a couple of times as we descended. We did a circuit around and then back up to the shallow end. Here, we had a brief review whilst Steve and Jon checked that we were all okay, and then we went under again. This time it was for much longer! We swam about, went through hoops and even played some underwater Frisbee. I even thought I was getting the hang of swimming about with a bit more ease. I did have a bit of a panic when my mask started to fill with water, and despite fiddling with it I didn’t know how to get it to dissipate. Karen, one of the instructors, flashed me an ‘Ok’ signal, but I was a bit too panicky to answer! I made a beeline for the surface, and came up lifting my mask to try and drain it out. I had enough forethought at least to inflate my jacket so that I bobbed with not too much difficulty on the surface. Karen came up alongside me.

“You okay?” She smiled.

“Sorry.” I replied. “A little bit of panic there!”

She showed me how to clear my mask of water, and we went back down.

Later on, Oli told me at this point that she had no idea what was going on, or what the instructors might have been trying to correct or teach. In her words:

‘I was just sitting on the bottom of the pool puffing away on my air, and trying to work out what everyone was doing. At one point, the two instructors kept flashing the ‘Ok’ signal at me, which I was doing back to show I was fine. But then they kept doing the ‘Not Ok’ signals at each other and looking at me with concern. I kept trying to sort of convey with my eyes that “No, I’m fine! I’m okay!” But it turns out that doesn’t come across too well underwater.’

Me and Oli with our Try Dive certificates!

After about an hour and a half in the pool, playing, swimming and posing for photos, we finally all surfaced again and it was the end of the session. I thought it was amazing, especially when I used my weight jacket properly and got a little round of underwater applause from Jon. I will definitely be coming back for more (once my exams are out of the way), so watch this space!

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