What next ?
Yesterday I travelled down to the London dive show, not because I wanted dive kit but because I wanted to listen to Jarrod Jablonski give a talk on his recent world record cave dive with fellow WKPP member Casey Mckinley. Jarrod - CEO of GUE had attended the DIRx weekend last October but I had been unable to attend because I was away on holiday. So when I heard he was attending the dive show I decided to trek down and make a day of it, obviously it was great to meet up with friends and talk about diving, which right now is all I seem to want to do. Jarrod talked about their 26 hour dive which is about as far removed from my own diving as you can get, right now the prospect of spending 26 minutes in the water is daunting.
It is almost 12 months since I took my GUE fundamentals course and I have written about those experiences before, it is also almost 12 months since I was made redundant from a company where I had been for 12 years and ended almost 28 years of continuous employment, I decided I would relax during the summer and get in as much diving in as possible which didn’t really happen, the week day diving was now in the deeper depths and although I have been diving for 13 years I was now happier in the shallows learning and developing my new GUE skills, so the last 12 months have meant hours of diving inland sites with only a couple of ventures in to the sea.
In October I went on what was billed as the holiday of a lifetime, 16 of us headed for the Galapagos, we had spent two years saving and looking forward to it, in the end the holiday just didn’t press the right buttons for me and I really can’t explain why. I fell back to the old style of diving, ignoring everything about the importance of the team and minimum gas management I had learnt on my course, although I was able to dive the “right” gas that was about it, the dives were about spending as much time in “solo mode” and minimum gas on a couple of dives really did mean minimum gas.
When I came back I was able to do my fundies upgrade dive, I was very happy with the dive probably because I didn’t know it was happening, Clare Gledhill my instructor is very good at working out what is best for the student and not knowing something is going to happen is certainly the best way for me and I have since learned it is a trick she uses on other students. Since then I really haven’t been in the water that much which is probably due to financial constraints and also because I am not used to diving over the winter and really need to sort some different thermal protection out, as I haven’t found anything which works. This is where the frustrations have begun poor thermal protection means I am adding more gas than I should to the suit which then makes gas migration more difficult to manage, therefore the cycle of felling uncomfortable in the water begins.
I have become so frustrated with diving I just don’t want to do the one thing I need to do and that is to practice, a few weeks ago I was supposed to be diving at another get together, the alarm went off at 3am and for the first time I looked at the clock and decided not to dive, I tossed and turned for the next couple of hours and because I had arranged to meet someone I had to go anyway, I arrived and spent the day in the freezing cold talking and then we headed back to Gareth’s house for an evening of talking about more diving. We headed back to Vobster on the Sunday morning and I handed over the torch I was selling, and after a couple of hours of standing around I headed off back home, so 400 miles, 8 hours in the car and I had achieved nothing.
So what next? I took a decision last week, which will either be the right one or financially very silly, I have sold both my Faber twin sets, because I am sure these are adding to my problems if it turns out these were not the problem then I have just wasted quite a lot of money. I wasn’t sure when I was going to dive next, not having any cylinders makes life a little more difficult. I have been lucky enough to have received some kind offers of borrowing a set and going diving, once I have decided what is going to work then I will work out what I am going to do, if that means spending more money on yet another twin set then so be it, if it doesn’t come together I don’t know what I will do, because the thought of giving up something I have enjoyed for a number of years doesn’t bare thinking about, more importantly the friends I have made I don’t want to contemplate loosing. Just writing this upsets me to even think about it. I spoke to Richard Walker yesterday as he has been spending some time working overseas, but he is coming back to the UK soon and I don’t have the time to organise anything in the next couple of weeks, but this would have been just what I needed, to get away and spend sometime practicing my skills, so I can either do some training dives with an instructor in the UK or maybe what I need to do is find an overseas one – right now 5 days of practice would be great, until then Alastair and Clare have said I can join them next weekend for a dive – apparently no one is judging me, I just need to believe it.