Why, oh why oh why!

In my youth scuba diving was my passion. Those were the days before drysuits, nitrox and BCDs; when a Fenzy ABLJ was cutting edge technology, you made your own wetsuit using sheets of neoprene and miles of seam tape in a contrasting colour and your dive knife was big enough to affect your buoyancy! Diving influenced my life to the extent that I read Marine Zoology at university although I never did much work in that field afterwards.

After a number of years more diving, in North Wales, the Lake District, Stoney Cove, Cornwall, Devon and even Victorian bottle collecting in the Ouse, clocking up  several hundred dives and a lot of stories, life, jobs, family intervened and I slowly became an ex diver. Until a couple of years ago that is, when the chance to spend a month in Hawaii came up and the idea of re-training entered my head so I could experience the tropical seas around the idyllic Hawaiian island of Kauai.

In the many years since I'd dived before, an upstart organisation called PADI invaded the country. They had existed as a training organisation in my early years of diving but only for the folks across the pond. Here in the UK, apart from a few independent clubs, it was BSAC or nothing. I originally trained to BSAC 2nd Class - no idea what that translates into nowadays, but never having been a "clubby" person and, having dropped out from BSAC as soon as I could find buddies outside the club, I welcomed the chance to follow the PADI route to help me into my second incarnation as a diver.

After doing OW with PADI in the chilly waters at Vobster I spent my month in Kauai and did the advanced OW over there, amongst lots of other diving. Sadly I was hooked again so various specialties and rescue diver followed over the next couple of years culminating in the acquisition of Master Scuba Diver status and a rapidly filling log book.

Apart from Kauai my diving has included trips to Lanzarote and others around the south west coast of the UK; a good range of training, wrecks, reefs, deep and shallow (under Swanage Pier and Babbacombe Bay). So on to the next challenge.