Open Water

Wraysbury Dive Centre is a hole.

I mean literally: a man-made depression in the Earth's surface, a short distance west of Heathrow Airport and the M25 motorway that circles London.

Once one of many gravel pits that pock-mark the area, it's now full of water and, at the weekends, full of divers.

We visited Wraysbury Dive Centre on Sunday for our first open water excursion. That is, our first dive outside of a swimming pool and our initiation into the wider world of scuba diving in the UK. After weeks of being stared at by casual swimmers in the local pool and feeling slightly out of place, we were suddenly surrounded by divers - lots of them - squeezing into wetsuits and swinging air tanks onto their backs. "It's going to be diver soup", said Geoff, our instructor.

As a relatively shallow man-made lake near to London, Wraysbury is almost an ideal site for diver training. You have to try very hard to dip below 10 metres because in most places the water's simply not that deep. It's also relatively warm, for a lake, because it's so shallow. They've even sunk a few vehicles to add variety to the underwater landscape.

But it's also very silty and when filled with trainees struggling to control their buoyancy it doesn't take long for the water to cloud with muck kicked up by fins and crash-landings on the lake bed. The result is poor visibility (or 'vis' in diver-speak). At its best on Sunday you could see about 3-4 metres. At its worst you knew you'd come across a sunken taxi or bus because you literally swam into it.

One good thing about poor vis was it rendered the other divers in the water invisible. Judging by the numbers on the shore when we arrived there must have been plenty underwater by the time we dived, but once down we didn't encounter very many. What wasn't so good about the vis was trying to stay in touch with our instructors, who were liable to vanish from sight with just a couple of fin kicks. But they did a great job of looking after us novices.

One of them brought along a camera and snapped the picture of me at the top of this post.

I don't know if I'll go back to Wraysbury Dive Centre. It provided a great introduction to diving outside of a pool environment and the poor vis and crowded water created new challenges. One of the pleasures of diving, I'm told, is to encounter marine life in its natural habitat. The only living things we saw in the water on Sunday were neoprene-clad figures with masks and fins.