Hello February 6, 2006
Posted by chris in : Uncategorized , trackbackHello - this page to tell you about me. (Why you would be interested I don’t know but that is for you to ponder about yourself…)
I started diving in 1990 a few years after I had first decided to get qualified. I had intended to take my Open Water when I worked in Sheffield, but the chap in the dive shop put me off with tales of cold water and 7mm wetsuits….. In the end I learned in Gildenburgh which is near where my parents lived. Despite it being August the water was still cold so I decided to get a drysuit. I bought a secondhand one from Gildy and they threw in a free drysuit course.
This ended up with me getting “the bug” and spending a lot of time either talking about diving or reading about it and wanting to do more. I befriended a few people at Gildy and spent a bit of time helping out there. In the end I worked there in return for some more free courses. Around this time my Mum was in the last stages of lung cancer, so I spent more time in Peterborough and helped out with students and spent Sundays in the compressor shed. The site’s owner Ian Forster wanted me to qualify as an instructor, but that looked like a lot of hard work and not much money!! Besides I had just finished my MA in Marketing.
My Mum died that year and I moved back to London for work. My Dad lived in Peterborough up until his death in January this year so we still dived Gildy from time to time. It hasn’t improved.
In 94 I got a job in Cheltenham and moved there. I joined the local PADI club - Dive 90 which was part of the shop of the same name. I met a whole group of new people and being new to the area they soon became my main friends and diving my main activity. I began to dive regularly with one friend and she and I found we shared a similar view to diving and ended up as buddies for just about all the diving we did.
The job in Cheltenham was crap and after a year I went back freelance. I moved to Bristol as it was on the main rail link to London and near to Cheltenham where I still had a contract with my old employer. I had promised my buddy a trip to Oban and she and I took a weeks holiday there to dive with Puffin. At some point we got a bit pissed and well… err… like.. well now we live together.
We moved to London in 96 as Bristol was not working for me at all. London might be good for work but it isn’t for diving. We managed to get a few trips, but the old crowd from Dive 90 were beginning to thin out. People leave or move and lose touch. My partner Kelly and me were diving less and mountainbiking more. Like many other folks we decided to do a course to get us back into the swing of things and so in 97 we took our Nitrox course at Bovisand.
At the time Kelly had not done her Rescue diver so we booked a trip to Gran Canaria with a couple of friends and she took the course there. My friends and I went mountainbiking so I never got to dive there although Kelly assures me there was nothing to see.
In 2001 we bought a small sailboat which we kept at Brighton marina. It was just big enough to sleep on and became our weekend retreat. As we had a base there we decided to join Brighton BSAC and spent a wonderful summer diving with our new friends at the club. I had never really liked BSAC and my time at Gildy taught me they were generally not safe divers. However, once we had joined up I realised that divers are just like any group of people and a mixture of good, bad and stupid alike, our “branch” as they call themselves were no different. Kelly’s job took us to Italy in 2003 and we had to leave but I still miss those days and some of the very good friends we made. I am a BSAC convert of sorts.
In Italy I got to develop a longstanding passion of mine for mixed gasses. We took our IANTD Trimix course. It was a huge leap for us with unfamiliar gear and the entry into what many folks call “technical” diving. It was a humbling experience for someone that had worked in the industry and had been a diver so long. Finally I realised I was a crap diver.
Kelly’s boss opened a new office in Luxembourg and we moved here last year, 2005. There is no sea, but we have a large lake to dive in. We have also taken our crossover from PADI Rescue to CMAS 3* to make it easier to dive in nearby France.
Since there is no sea we have started cave diving and have done our first level qualifications so far. We are hoping to do full cave over the next 18 months or so. We have also decided to do our BSAC instructor course and recently completed the foundation course. Its a bit difficult to get to courses from here so I guess we will finish that off in 2008.
I hope you enjoy my site.
Chris
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