Diving UK

The last two weekends have been very busy with diving stuff. Well, that means they have been busy ones for Dave and kind of boring ones for me, especially the first when Dave had to go to the class room training and pool session for the Open Water Diving class. For me it meant I was able to work a little bit around the house, play with Amber and.... read Harry Potter. Yes, I bought the book. I didn't want to, because I didn't want to be part of the whole Harry Potter hysteria. But then I saw the book as a special offer at Tesco and I couldn't resist. I haven't finished it yet, so no need to ask me any question. I still have 1/3 to go.

But Harry was not the reason for this post. I wanted to share some diving experiences from the UK with you. Last weekend Dave had to do his 4 open water dives for his certificate and I decided to bring my equipment to England and go diving myself. The dive store where Dave booked the class said it is no problem, I certainly will find someone to buddy up with and so I travelled to England with all my stuff.

You may have heard about the flooding there. Well, we were lucky and didn't have that much rain, even if it was more than normal. But still we both were not very excited about the thought of going diving in the pouring rain. Not that getting wet is the problem, but sitting outside between dives, getting cold and having no dry place to change clothes is the bad thing. But we were lucky and it was mostly sunny on both days last weekend. The lake we went to is a little bit more than a one hour drive away and we enjoyed the drive very much (except of the drive home on Saturday, but that's a different story). Dave did his mandatory dives and on both days I found somebody to dive with me. So what did I learn during these days: First of all, almost every male diver in England has at least one tattoo. Second, they have changing rooms and don't change on the parking lot like we do at most places in Germany or the Netherlands. And third: the main attraction at the bottom of the lake is trash. Well, kind of. To make diving at that lake more attractive they placed a Doppeldecker bus, an airplane and a truck (or lorrie in British English) at the ground. All connected by ropes so nobody could get lost. And the ropes were very helpful since the visibility was so low (3m) and it was crowded under water.

We had a lot of fun and everybody passed the course. Did I mention that the name of the dive store is Scubadoo Divers? Therefore we bought a Scubidoo cake for the last day as a kind of celebrating the new divers.

I mentioned the drive home on Saturday. Well, the traffic on this whole weekend was terrible. First of all we ended up in a traffic jam on Friday night on our way from the airport. It took us more than an hour for one mile. It was late and we had to get up very early on Saturday morning so you can imagine that non of us were very happy with this situation on Friday. On Saturday we just wanted to stop by the base to get gas and something to eat before going home and walk Amber. It was a very quick stop, but then on our way from Lakenheath to Thetford we came to a stop on the A11. It seems that the road was closed, maybe an accident. After sitting there for a while we decided to turn around and use a different, much longer way to go home. That was no fun. Especially for the waiting dog at home. But otherwise the whole weekend was very nice. And now we can plan on going to some more diving trips together...

Blubb, blubb,

Anke