Stoney

I’d told myself I was going to learn to scuba dive many times. Sometimes it was a personal ambition, sometimes a New Year’s resolution, sometimes just watching too much David Attenborough on BBC2 and wanting to see the underwater world in person. My new girlfriend, who already had 25 years of diving experience behind her, tolerantly let me bang on about it for a month or two before her patience wore thin and she handed me a gift voucher for a dive school in Canary Wharf.

Dive training wasn’t quite what I’d expected. I’d imagined donning a wetsuit, and  air tank and rolling backwards off a boat into Nemo’s back garden. The reality was less glamorous; for four weeks we climbed into full dive gear and practiced our floating and sinking in two lanes roped off at the side of a public swimming pool beside normal folk doing laps.

Pool-work alone isn’t enough though. To be certified, a diver needs four dives in open water to demonstrate the skills learnt. My first dive site would be a flooded quarry in Leicestershire called Stoney cove. I was going to the bottom of an English lake in November and the water was so cold I’d be wearing a wetsuit over my wetsuit.

We arrived at Stoney early to get underwater before other divers stirred up the silt and reduced the visibility to zero. We kitted up, tried to look like we knew what we were doing, and stepped from the dock into the water. Once the whole group was in, our instructor checked for OK signs all round, gave the thumbs down, and we began our descent. The water was freezing and got colder and darker as we went down. We could barely see twenty feet through the murk, but I didn’t care; I‘d entered a new world. I was finally diving.

We started on our qualification tasks – safe descents and ascents, mask clearing, buoyancy control – and soon came to removing our masks completely. Human eyes can’t focus in water so losing your mask is a big deal, but I’d done this in the pool a few times already and confidently settled onto the bottom, reached up and pulled my mask from my face.

Cold water immediately shot up my nose. I reflexively sniffed hard to clear it, but the nearest lungful of air was 20 feet above me. I tried to breathe through my mouthpiece, but choked on the water in my mouth and suddenly found myself on the edge of panic. I realised that I was beginning to drown and it was all I could do to suppress the fear enough to gasp a breath of air between coughs.

Suddenly I felt a hand pinch my nose shut. Water stopped flooding my attempts to breathe and for a minute or two I just breathed while my instructor held my nose, as life slowly came back under control. My mask finally back on, we made our ascent and when we broke the surface my instructor grinned at me.

“Thought I’d lost you for a moment there”.