Death of Andy Holmes Highlights Hidden Danger of Watersport

When I saw the message on Twitter the name rang a distant bell. Where had I heard that name: Andy Holmes?

Clicking through to the Telegraph.co.uk article told me immediately - Holmes and Redgrave, gold medal winners in the rowing at the Seoul Olympics.

What then caught me eye was the probably cause - leptospirosis, or Weil's disease. Again, a name I half recognise but an issue I've heard about before - a rare and sometimes fatal infection caught in fresh water rivers and lakes.

During my diving at inland sites I've had thoughts of this in the back of my mind. The BSAC training prepares you for all sorts of eventualities underwater, but not once was this particular risk mentioned.

To be fair, it is highly unusual, but according the Leptospirosis Information Center commercial divers are required to take specific precautions against it.

Anyone who practices watersport in fresh water risks potential infection. Swimmers, canoeists, divers and even anglers could fall victim to it. The risk doesn't just come from swallowing water - any area of broken skin, such as cut or graze, can allow the bacteria into the body.

The point of this post isn't to scare. Thousands of people practice watersports every day in the UK and we allow our children to play in streams and beside rivers. I don't know the numbers, but I'm sure more people die of drowning than of this disease. Many more are killed on the roads every day, but that doesn't stop us getting into our cars.

The death of Andy Holmes at 51, when he was still a fit and active sportsman, is a reminder of one particular risk that we take when we go into fresh water.

Condolences to his family at what must be a very difficult time.

Vobster Quay is a Dump

Don't get me wrong - Vobster Quay Inland Dive Centre is a well-equipped dive location.

But there's no getting away from the fact it's a dump. Not that it's very different from other dive centres I've been to or heard about. They're all dumps.

It's curious how an old car, disused aeroplane or a boat that's past it's sell-by date suddenly become more interesting when it's sunk in an equally redundant quarry. Every weekend a fair proportion of the UK's diving community head for one of these holes in the ground, spending their precious recreation time swimming around flooded junk yards.

Today was my first dive in Vobster. During my hour underwater (two 30 minute dives) I encountered several sunken boats, a sliced-up aeroplane, the bridge section from a ship and a garden gnome with a fishing rod, complete with fish. According to their website and map I missed out on various other features including submerged cars and an industrial tumble drier.

The only aquatic life I encountered were hordes of trainee divers, mainly clustered around the many underwater platforms.

I didn't take up diving to see everyday objects in a slightly unusual environment. A disused boat or car isn't any more interesting, to me, for having been sunk.

To be fair, the main function of inland dive centres is to provide an opportunity for diver training and practice. They tend to be old quarries, filled with water, and without the various pieces of discarded machinery they'd be featureless pools where divers would quickly become either bored or lost. Or both.

The apparently random assortment of random rubbish is in fact a collection of carefully placed landmarks, allowing divers to navigate their way around underwater while giving them something to look at. It's also a great way of re-using old stuff, although I don't know how environmentally friendly it is. I assume the stuff is cleaned of toxins, such as oil, before it's tossed in.

I'll probably have to go to Vobster at least one more time to complete my training, and if I keep diving I might dip into an inland site once in a while. But I'm much more interested in diving in places where there's lots of marine life to look at, or interesting underwater features to explore.

That said, our seas have also been used as dumps for hundreds, if not thousands of years!

Ocean Diver (Almost)

I'm taking the BSAC Ocean Diver course.

So it's appropriate that yesterday's diving was in the ocean. Or to be more precise, the English Channel. Or to be even more precise, Swanage Bay.

During my various visits to Swanage I've watched the dive boats coming in and out with mild curiousity. Where do they go? What do they do? So there was some satisfaction in being part of the team loading a boat on the beach, watched by casual observers on the promenade. How many of them harboured a latent desire to be joining us, as I always had?

The Alton BSAC club is fortunate enough to own its own RIB (rigid-hulled inflatable boat) courtesy of a National Lottery grant. It was large enough to carry the six in our party to our two dive sites, the first of which was just off Swanage's west beach.

Diving in the sea brings it's own challenges. First there's buoyancy - a novice diver needs to carry more weight because it's harder to sink in salt water. Secondly, the suface is constantly moving because of wave action. In a busy harbour there's also plenty of surface disturbance from other boat users.

Performing my first backwards roll entry into the sea was relatively easy - I've got used to the idea of falling into water and assuming that I'll eventually surface. I just concentrate on breathing and natural buoyancy sorts out everything else.

My main problem was overcoming this buoyancy and getting below the surface. On the first dive I was carrying 10kg in weight and could not get down. My buddy added another 2kg to my pocket and at the same time I remembered what my instructor had said about tension creating buoyancy problems. As I floated on the surface I told myself to relax and allowed the waves to wash over me. It did the trick and moments later I was 6m down, on the seabed.

I learned a huge amount from my two ocean dives and it's given me plenty to blog about in the coming days. I had my first encounter with marine life, my first dive to a wreck, my first drift dive and my first underwater incident that proved the importance of all our safety training.

It's also left me with some important decisions to make. Do I buy a wetsuit or a drysuit? Should I invest in an SMB (surface marker buoy)? Is this the right time to buy a dive computer?

Lots to think about and lots to write about. I'm not a qualified Ocean Diver yet, but at least I've now dived in the ocean!

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.