The school was essentially a shed with a small pool in front of it, this being just like a normal swimming pool but with no shallow end (It's a diving school after all!) In it we experienced the strange but exhilarating feeling of using the breathing apparatus. I tend to breath through my mouth anyway so it was just like walking around in the living room with the exception that there was a foot of water above my head. It's odd how quickly you accept that strange fact.
Lisa and I both tried the pool experience. She is a fearless and strong swimmer and I am, well, too timid to admit terror, so we booked a 'Try-Dive' on the Friday afternoon. Lynne, infected by our enthusiasm said she would come along and try the scuba gear or at least a snorkel. As time went past she demonstrated such a considerable talent for back-pedalling; she should ride fixed-wheel bicycles. Anyway Friday dawned as ferociously hot as every other day that week and we nervously checked in for our dive. Some form filling followed, followed by a short but useful explanation of theory and hand signals. Then there was a sizing up of feet and leg-length etc. in order to get the right size of wetsuit and fins. It was my first experience of rubber clothing - what a laugh! The legs are the main problem. It was one of the few times when I might have been grateful to have skinnier legs. Got the bottoms pulled up eventually and then it was time to struggle into the top half too. The thing to do is to plunge into the pool to fill the suit up with water as it keeps a constant temperature. It's hard to over-state the value of this as it limits the cold shock of getting into the sea and even more importantly in Lanzarote in August, it keeps the heat at bay. The temperature was 46 degrees that day! When I got back out of the pool Lisa was still struggling with her legs and the wet-suit. Three pairs of hands makes light work though and eventually we shoe-horned her into it.
Of course it takes more than a stylish rubber suit to make a diver and next I was fitted with a belt with lead weights on it. "Don't go near the pool!" I was told - not bad advice as the belt must have weighed about 20 pounds. It certainly pressed down on the hips.
The breathing gear goes on next. Obviously there is a tank of air, but also a waistcoat which can be inflated to give you buoyancy. I haven't seen James Bond in one of these (I kept thinking of dear old James; I shall never see him in scuba gear again without laughing) but it was a fantastic bit of kit.
The final touch to the ensemble is a mask, a tight fit on the face to keep the water out.
"Spit on it; think of it as a Chelsea Mask!" said the instructor, adding "unless you happen to be a Chelsea supporter. Keep it to yourself if you are..."
Saliva prevents the mask from misting up; there's not much point in going to the bottom of the sea and not being able to see through the window!
Then at last it was time to 'take the plunge' and our group of about 8 novices and 2 (or 3?) instructors, partly English and partly German, strode off purposefully to the nearby beach. (Could we not have been lifted there by crane? I must have weighed 18 stone). Walking across the stones of the beach was agony, weighing as much as a beached whale and having no shoes on. It was like heaven when the instructor called on us to sit down in the water and lie back and let the inflatable jacket do all the work. You can't walk with the fins on; they are about 18 inches long so you have to put them on once you are floating. Maybe it's just me but I found that quite a challenge. What with the buoyancy, the exaggerated weight and my general lack of flexibility (especially in all that crazy gear) I found myself rolling madly all over the Atlantic Ocean. The instructors were good though and noticed a geriatric and struggling baby diver when they saw one so I was unable to drown quite yet.
We were told to move forwards, as if crawling, into the water. This was done gradually until all the party are in the water, with head submerged, and hopefully all breathing the tank air. On our initial dive the instructors kept control of our buoyancy. I was unaware of it as the air was released from the jacket to make us float with neutral buoyancy in the sea. There is a mad rolling time as the jacket and air tank interfere with your stability then suddenly all is serene and you are apparently weightless.
As we moved into the water, and it shelves down steeply there, the instructor moved a few feet away from us and then beckoned us forward. So we moved forwards into the sea in a series of stop-start movements as the instructor moved back and then beckoned us on.
The instructors were understandably anxious that we should not swim all over the place but remain instead in a tightly packed group where they could see us and count us at all times. This lead to a bit of bumping and the odd elbow or hand knocking you as eleven or twelve scuba divers occupied the space which might be quite intimately cosy with just two or three rubber clad nutters.
The stop-start advance continued for a few minutes and we started to gain a little depth. Very soon the pressure became apparent. The water in your body is virtually incompressible and your body doesn't change shape much as you dive - not so the air in your body, as the air in your lungs slowly becomes more compressed and the air in your sinuses gets squeezed down small. It is the sinus cavities compressing that cause some ear pain. I have rather waxed up ears and I found it hard to 'equalise' the pressure difference across my ears. This led to a few minutes of quite unpleasant ear pain but it soon faded.
Once I got lower in the water and started to feel more relaxed I felt confident to look around me and see my new universe, about a hundred feet across with no obvious North, South, East or West. (No wonder they don't want you swimming off - which way is home?) Under Lanzarote's sunshine there is much light and plenty to see. I checked to see where Lisa was and she was giving me the 'OK' signal and obviously having a good time. Shoals of fish came to check us out, fascinating colours and patterns. Above us was the inflatable boat belonging to the dive school. How odd to see an anchor in use from the business end! Plenty of noise down there too, mostly the sound of me breathing but also the general hubbub of the ocean smashing itself tirelessly against the shore and various other things banging about including the gentle tinkle of the boat's anchor cable. One of the instructors had clearly got the family relationships sorted out in advance as he was taking photos and getting shots of mother/daughter and father/son groups etc and photoed Lisa and I together.
Our group was still tightly packed but we moved around the sea-bed a short way, wheeling in formation like rubber soldiers in a very odd military parade. In time we made it back to the same place as we had embarked from and in no time we were floating on the surface again, not before taking part in the rolling motion of the sea which was a mildly alarming experience as the environment seemed to go backwards and forwards past us in time to the waves. Standing up we were reminded of how heavy and ungainly we were on land. I felt like I weighed a ton! Naomi, one of the instructors, help me stand and haul myself back up the shingle and stone slope of the beach. Normally I would be embarrassed to be helped to walk by a girl but I was prepared to make an exception for blond, tanned Kiwi Naomi, partly because she was a great advert for the benefits of the outdoor life and partly because my tired old legs could only just hold me up!
Then it was back to the 'school' to divest ourselves of all this weight, having help to remove the breathing gear and jacket and Oh-so-carefully taking off that lead belt. (It was foremost in my mind that the heavy belt was vertically above the delicate and unprotected toes!) The wet-suit seemed to peel off somewhat more easily than it went on and off we went to see the photos of ourselves. Everyone seemed to have a good time and when it was suggested that we did another dive the next day Lisa and I agreed immediately.
The next day the preliminaries were sorted out more quickly and then Lisa and I were shown the workings of the jackets so that we could control our own buoyancy and set the height we floated at in the water on our own. This is done with three possible release valves which discharge air from the jacket. Air rises in water so generally you use whichever valve is at the top. If you try to use a valve which is at the bottom the air just stays inside the jacket! We quickly got dressed in our scuba gear this time and Lisa was issued with a different suit, one which she managed to put on in no time.
Somehow we contrived to enter the water from a sandy part of the beach, (why couldn't we do that the day before?) and even the fin-fitting acrobatics were less embarrassing. As old hands we entered the water somewhat more quickly which for me was not a good thing and the compression and the struggle with equalising my ear pressure etc never went well. I was in some pain for quite a while. This does diminish however and I was just getting comfortable in the water again when I realised everyone else had gone back to the surface. Not sure if I had missed some signal to go back up I followed like a lemming, only to discover that Lisa had risen to the top somewhat involuntarily and the instructor had gone with her to see that she was okay. Of course this meant that we all had to dive back down again from the surface and I had to endure the ear pain all over again. I was equalising my ear pressure as much as I could but it was still very painful for about two or three minutes. Then it fades away slowly and is soon forgotten in the fascinating submarine world. I started to experiment with the buoyancy control which is when I realised why Lisa had gone to the surface so unexpectedly. As you start to rise the air in the jacket expands, thus causing even more buoyancy and making you rise still more in a chain reaction. Anyway my experiments led to me hitting the surface suddenly and sheepishly explaining that nothing was actually wrong; I just didn't weigh enough... The instructor later explained that even quite experienced divers often surface quite involuntarily which made me feel quite a lot better.
Well, off we went again back down into the 'depths', more ear pain and more exhilaration as a reward for my suffering. This was still, after all, my first hour under water so I didn't expect it to come too easily. We started to swim out across a large expanse of light coloured sand, moving quite slowly - in fact the instructor seemed to hang in the water like a true amphibian. I've seen newts do the very same thing. It was interesting to watch the experienced divers too; they seemed to breath so slowly whereas Lisa and I were a steady stream of bubbles. They were using their air intake to vary their depth very accurately. We beginners seemed more preoccupied with just making sure each breath was followed by another one!
After a distance of maybe a hundred yards we came to a length of old anchor rope, maybe lost from a fishing boat. Our instructor slowly pulled on it; I couldn't make out why at first but he was examining it. He had hoped to find a seahorse clinging to it but when he came to the end of his rope he produced an underwater notebook and showed us the words "SEA HORSE GONE" As a consolation he handed us a crab which ran up and down our arms and amused me by running in 'mid air' as it fell back to the sea bed. As soon as it reached the sea bed it buried itself in the sand, very aware that there are things out there that eat crabs, and not knowing if I was one of them. Twice during the dive he caught octopuses, the first one conforming to Hollywood stereo-types of scary undersea monsters by glueing itself to the front of his mask and squirting brown ink all over us all. Having failed to find any seahorses we swam back to shallower water and looked at the fish in a great grassy reed bed, many small yellow fish, some amazingly bright. On a nearby rock reef, an outcrop of volcanic lava, were more brightly coloured fish, some of electric blue, some multi coloured Wrasse and a few seriously ugly things skulking where the nasty divers couldn't see them. Bigger disc shaped fish, many with a large black spot half way along their lateral line came to view us and inspect the sand we stirred up.
All too soon it was time to leave the water though and experience the effects of gravity on very heavy people again. I asked where we had been and had it pointed out on the sea's surface before us. Our depth had been about 6.5 metres, not a great depth but that's not the point. Just going where people don't normally go is the point.
Both Lisa and I are left wondering whether to go for diving qualifications, if only to find out what on earth PADI stands for.
Pool experience free, try-dive 58euros, further dive 44euros
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