All you need is the air that you breathe

SCUBA diving always conjures up images of beautiful ladies in tiny bikinis diving for shells in James Bond films.

I jumped at the chance to take part in a trial session myself, half-convinced that I too could achieve such heady heights of glamour.

The Berkshire Dive Crew is running a series of try dives, offering people the chance to Discover Scuba Diving, at Chiltern Pools in Amersham, on Monday evenings.

For £15, anyone from the age of 12 upwards can spend just over an hour learning to work the equipment and having a dive.

Caroline Bean of the Berkshire Dive Crew says that these try dives are a chance for people to see if they want to enrol in The Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) Open Water Course, which involves learning the basics of safe diving. Once this course is finished, the participants are able to dive to a depth of 18 metres.

What does she think is the appeal of diving?

"I think everyone gets something different out of it," she says. "Some scuba dive when they are holiday, and some people only in this country. It has become a real lifestyle sport though.

"You can see so many different and beautiful things under the water."

I arrived at the pool side and was offered a disclaimer to sign. However, Caroline informed me that the instructors would take everything at our own pace when we felt comfortable and the form also identified certain groups of people with possible health problems who should consult a doctor before diving.

There were three of us on the try dive and two instructors, Christina and Stephen Appleton, both of whom had been diving for about two-and-a-half years.

I was given a pair of flippers and a mask. The first challenge was to try to get enough saliva in the mouth to spit into the mask and rinse it around to stop it fogging up when we put it on. I find it quite difficult to spit on demand, especially in front of an audience -- it is just not something ladies do.

We were then given weight belts to tie around our waist, which would help us to sink. We were told about the mouthpiece and the way to get air into and out of our jackets to help us sink or surface.

Christina also taught us the different hand signals we would be using when we dived, as it is impossible to speak and quite hard to hear under the water and it is very important to know how to communicate with the other divers and instructors.

"Diving is very levelling. People from all sorts of professions take it up and everybody teams up together," Caroline says.

Finally, kitted up and fully versed in the special sign language, we slid into the water. The first dive was more of a slow sink to the bottom of the diving pool to try out the jackets and learn to acclimatise to the pressure of the water.

This meant being able to pop your ears by holding your nose and swallowing, "just like when you are on an aeroplane," Christina explains cheerfully.

My ears have never been that great at popping on planes however many sweets I suck on take-off. It takes some serious turbulence before I can get them to pop and short of scuba diving over the Bermuda triangle, I couldn't imagine how I was going to be able to manage.

Fortunately, the instructors were fantastic. As we went down, they kept an eye on us and kept checking the OK signal with us. After about half a minute I could feel my right ear start to hurt under the pressure and I gave the signal and Stephen took me back up to the surface.

He calmed me down and suggested several different ways I could try to pop my ears as I went down.

"We'll go very slowly and if you have any problems just signal"

I was feeling less and less like Ursula Andress in Dr No, but determined to give it a go, we went down very slowly. My ears didn't pop, but the pressure was a lot easier. We knelt on the bottom of the pool for a few moments and Stephen shook my hand to say well done.

During the second dive, we tried a basic skill of taking the mouth piece out, breathing out into the water and then clearing the mouthpiece and breathing through it again.

After that we were allowed to spend five or ten minutes swimming around under the water under the watchful eye of Christina and Stephen. The sense of freedom was immense. I wasn't particularly skilled at swimming with flippers, but it was great fun trying.

Personally, I think one of the best things about scuba diving is the way it relieves all the stress of everyday life. Once you are under the water you forget all about the world above and it is so relaxing.

% Berkshire Dive Crew organise regular courses at Chiltern Pools in Amersham and beginners can take part in Discover Scuba Diving on the next four Mondays. For more details about Discover Scuba Diving or the PADI Open Water Course, contact the Berkshire Dive Crew on (01344) 454245

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