For those that haven’t considered it yet, there are many good reasons for joining a local dive club. Enjoying the company of friends who share the same interests, availability of buddies for local diving, kit tips, access to training, information about local dive sites and conditions, getting the benefit of someone else’s knowledge and experience, first-hand information on potential holiday destinations  – the list goes on and on. It can really be considered to be more like a community than just a club, with friendships extending outside the common interest in diving as people discover they have other things in common. Many clubs have regular social evenings; ours also has guest speakers on a range of subjects of interest to divers, such as photography or environmental issues. Kit nights are popular too, with presentations by manufacturer reps and the opportunity to try out those shiny new toys.

There have been some decompression chamber visits as well – these are always popular. One at the Diver Training College near York has an added twist and is always oversubscribed. It is combined with a ‘hard-hat’ dive, giving a chance to experience what it was like in the early days of diving. What a strange experience that was. Massively heavy metal boots, a big bulky helmet with a very restricted view and a heavy chunk of lead hung around the neck. Makes you appreciate modern scuba gear that much more.

[youtube id=”ZWSM-hSrEGI” width=”100%” height=”400px”]

One thriving area at my local club, Christal Seas Scuba in Norwich, is group dive weekends and holidays. This is another benefit of a dive club, as the planning for these can be either shared or centrally organised. Lift sharing can be arranged too, cutting down on costs. Chris and Polly run a very active club, and almost every weekend there is something going on from Open Water training to Tec trips and everything in between. Christal Seas Scuba is a 5* PADI IDC doing a huge number of certifications every year, which keeps the Instructors (and us DMs) run ragged at times.

If you read my last travel article (Leap into Saint Lucia) you will be aware that for quite a few years my wife Sandy was a non-diver. This didn’t stop her from joining us on a club trip to El Gouna in the Red Sea, or enjoying a trip to Mexico, split between Playa Del Carmen and Cozumel, during which in between spa sessions she tried her first Open Water dive (and really enjoyed it). It was the social aspect that attracted her, and when she started her Open Water training it was surprising how much information she had picked up just by being around divers during the inevitable discussions over gear, the benefits of this or that piece of equipment and of course the post-dive ‘did you see’ and ‘what happened was’ conversations in the bar.

Fast forward a couple of years and Sandy is now an Advanced Open Water diver with a couple of good diving holidays in Malta, Egypt and Saint Lucia behind her and is just considering whether to do her Rescue Diver course on the way to Master Scuba Diver (not at all bad for someone who wouldn’t go out of her depth 2 years ago, but don’t tell her I said so). She has even joined us at Stoney Cove for a few weekends. For those who don’t know it, Stoney Cove is an inland dive centre that used to be a quarry. As such it has different depth shelves, which makes it an ideal training site so the club travels there – a lot. We take most of the rooms in a local hotel and make a social weekend of it because it’s too far for daily travel and you really need to be on site early to get the best parking. There are underwater attractions such as wrecks, aircraft and vehicles to make it more interesting too.

Sandy wasn’t diving, I hasten to add. There’s still no prospect that any water cold enough to require a drysuit will be suitable for serious consideration, but someone doing surface cover for the club is always welcome. No, that’s not accurate enough. The surface cover job is not just welcome, it is essential, indeed many dive sites require dive groups to have someone doing this job, and it frequently falls to non-diving partners or other family members who tolerate the strange addiction we have for pulling on rubber suits and jumping in water. They need to be familiar with the dive plan and the emergency action plan. Logging divers in and out, running to the van when someone has forgotten something or had a kit malfunction, helping divers don fins & masks and those wet gloves that just WON’T pull over your hands, keeping the first aid kit and oxygen handy, passing weights to someone who has underestimated just how much more they will need using a drysuit, looking after keys, wallets, purses, phones……even when it’s pouring with rain and blowing a gale. Look around during your next dive trip. Are there people doing that for your group or club? If so, when was the last time you bought them a drink, because they definitely deserve one.

Anyway, back to the holiday theme. We both love our holidays but one type of holiday that I had reluctantly ruled out up to now was a liveaboard. Not because it wasn’t attractive to me, but because when Sandy was a non-diver I thought it would be unfair to trap her on a small boat for a week with a group of enthusiastic divers, having nothing much to do except read, sunbathe and listen to us bore her about things she was only going to see in photos or videos. Well imagine my enthusiasm when after completing her AOW, she looked at the upcoming club holidays and said “well what about going on that Red Sea liveaboard trip in June then?”

So, a (very) short while later we were signed up to a club trip to the Southern Red Sea, St Johns, Elphinstone, Fury Shoal etc. booked through the ever popular Scuba Travel.

A first for both of us – our first liveaboard holiday, but hopefully not our last. An area of the Red Sea neither of us have dived in. Strangely, the club members on the trip are mostly recently qualified or less experienced divers. In fact Sandy is going to be one of the more experienced divers among us (in terms of dive numbers), which she still can’t quite believe. It should be an interesting trip with plenty to write about.