The try dive

The Try dive was at a pool in Lancashire.

The...Try ..Dive...

You'd be surprised how much fear those three words instilled in me!

However, I was determined, I was driven (literally- as Chris was behind the wheel I couldn't exactly leap out of the car on the M6!), and I was committed.

What do you take on a try dive? Yourself, would be the obvious answer. Clothes...towel...re-check the clothes...re-check the towel...re-check the- oh stuff it! Let's get on with this!

Chris picked me up from home and I went to her car like an aristocrat to the guillotine. The hung head, the steady plod to your place of execution... okay, I'm being over-dramatic, but this is thirty something years of condensed fear I'm coming to terms with in one night.

At what stage does fear kick in? It comes and goes in waves (again with the diving analogies), sometimes spreading from one location and sometimes hitting you all at once- usually that sick feeling in the stomach that churns and denies you food. You know you haven't eaten and you don't actually want to.

Anyone else would say "good for you for getting that far"- my attitude was far simpler- I wasn't going to think about it in the car- I was going to deal with the fear only, and only when I got into the water. The car wasn't going to hold any fear for me at all. The journey would be fine, it would be calm, it would be...

"If you keep hyperventilating" Chris said in her usual, patient, matter-of-fact voice as we pulled off the M6, "you'll be starving yourself of oxygen and using the dead air in your windpipe. By the time we get to the pool at nine o'clock- that's three hours away- you'll be in a right state"

Why does she have to discuss it with the same, maddeningly calm voice she might use to discuss what she was doing that evening, what soup she'd like, or what to channel to watch on the television?

I actually reckon this is her plan to deal with my fear- complete, total, under-whelmed response to my gibbering wreck in the car seat alongside.

The drive, an inexorable hour and a bit, ended at the dive shop (the club is run out of it by a guy called Mick) and at this stage I was quite prepared to be dumped and ignored, and rightly so. Chris is the senior instructor and she would have far more important instructor-organizational things to deal with than babysit someone like me- but I ended up talking to a couple of lunatics outside by the names of Gareth and Liam who addressed this fear-mountain of mine with classic northern humor- "what's the worst that could happen? You drown. Well, you'll only do that the once!" (thank-you, Liam!)

Try dives are supposed to be done in groups. Four, five, eight- I've really no idea how many you can have on a try dive, but Chris told me she was taking me solo for the night because she's proficient at dealing with reluctant divers (reluctant? That's in the Thesaurus for terrified, isn't it?)- apparently, she was being diplomatic (typical Chris word)

Pool side- first mistake- I thought I was being helpful in offloading the van only to be told afterward that someone had complained- as a try dive student I'm not allowed to handle any gear.

Cue kicking myself again.

Here's the plan for a standard try dive- you get a briefing by the poolside (that was okay), you are shown how they fit the air cylinder into the strap at the back of the BCD (Buoyancy control device- the jacket all divers wear- you look like someone from the movies for real, instead of in your imagination), and put the bits together. Air tank in the BCD, first and second stage regulator on the air tank, strap it into the BCD, lock the air hose into the BCD (you can inflate the jacket / BCD from the air tank which helps you stay on the surface without having to kick your legs too much- and let air out. It's vital for assisting in descending and ascending in the water), and collect the obligatory snorkel, mask and fins.

I'd worn as BCD once before. Chris gave me an orientation night at home a couple of weeks earlier. She'd turned up with her rig (slang term for everything she goes diving with), showed me how to put it together, and invited me to try it on / try it out- in the kitchen sink (because she couldn't fit the sink into her diving gear, we went to the sink instead of taking the sink with us)

It was at this stage Chris first met my fear. She's in the calm of my living room, showing me the BCD, the compressed air cylinder, the first and second stage regulator...and I'm displaying my usual signs. First, I go quiet. Second, I go quieter. Third, I talk in a really quiet voice because that's all I can manage until finally, she invites me to have a go.

So I'm stood there in my kitchen- t shirt, jeans, bare feet for traction and my slippers would be a health hazard, BCD et al and she fills the basin with cold water and invites me to stick my head in and breathe through the regulator.

On the first breath, water goes straight up my nose and I panicked. Yes, I'm stood there, safe in my own kitchen, leaning into a bowl of water, and I lost it.

Remember that fear thing I mentioned in a previous blog? Imagine the scariest thing you know and put yourself mentally in that place- that dark, scary, uncomfortable place where you have to confront it- and that was me.

Daft, isn't it? (stood up in my own kitchen and getting scared! I ask you! Hardly the stuff of action hero's, is it?)

You know how it is- you've been doing this since you first entered the world. About ten breaths a minute, six hundred an hour, fourteen thousand and four hundred a day, 5,256,000 a year....

We never stop to think how we breathe- we just do- so when someone says "stick your head in this basin of lukewarm water and breathe in" you're not exactly going to think about closing your nose off, are you? I finally managed this by holding my nostrils shut with my hands and then, only then, could I breathe- which resulted in a huge sigh of relief when (skip forward to try dive) I put a mask on and found it compressed my nostrils! YAY!! I didn't have to breathe through my nose at all!!!!

That was so much easier!

After the scuba mask came the fins (I have big feet, so you'd wonder why I bother. Size 11's mean I can use my own feet as fins- but I still took a pair of rubber fins because they were given to me for the duration. I've been told that calling them 'flippers' invites all kinds of forfeits ranging from smacked legs to being made to walk the plank...(or equivalent)

Finally, I was given a weight belt.

Okay, this is wierd. Here's negatively buoyant me, and they're giving me something to help me sink??? does that seem strange to you? That's like giving an anvil to a parachutist saying "well, you wanted to go down!"

Gearing up is covered in briefing, and then its time to put it on in the water- I believe some put this on at the pool side, but Chris tossed both sets into the pool at the shallow end and helped me get into it once in a standing position in the water. The rest of the dive club were about their business at the far end, and we had the shallow end pretty much to ourselves.

There I was, stood up, in flippers, shorts, t shirt, BCD, scuba mask, snorkel (wasn't using that yet!) and she gives me the golden rule of scuba diving.

Never, ever hold your breath. Holding the breath causes problems (or potential problems) when descending or ascending. Confined air spaces (ie: air in your lungs) compress and expand when under the pressure of a sub-sea environment so holding your breath isn't good.

Chris pointed out that it all came back to that simple thing we'd been doing since childhood. Breathe normally, she said- just breathe...

I was there, I was ready, it was time to go.

(part two in a minute)