I try to get away from the UK once every year on a dedicated diving holiday and if you can find a good scuba diving resort to head to it can make all the difference as to whether or not you will have a lasting memory or not. These are some of my recent experiences:

2005 – I splashed out and went to the Red Sea for the first time. I dived from a liveaboard out of the scuba diving resort of Marsa Alam. What a fantastic week. The six days on the boat and the final day in the resort was a superb combination.

2006 – Enjoyed Marsa so much that I did it again – this time with my usual diving buddy so some fantastic dives!

2007 – I took my daughter to Majorca with my BSAC club and we had 6 pretty mediocre dives there. It was out of season and though the weather was fine during the day, both my daughter and I slept in our fleecey undersuits we were so cold at night time.

2008 – This time my daughter stayed at home and I went to Minorca again with my dive club. Again it was out of season and the dive centre was very quiet. Not to be repeated.

2009 – My buddy and I decided to return to the Red Sea, this time on a live-aboard out of Sharm El Sheik. What a fantastic 6 days diving the wrecks of the northern Red Sea. However, Sharm as a resort was a dump and as for the airport – I will never go there again and intend heading for Marsa again the next time.

2010 – Next year? Well my buddy and I have decided to give the Red Sea a break until 2011. Next year we are doing Scapa Flow – the UK Mecca for divers. My buddy dived there two years ago and I was last up in 1994!

Without a doubt the whole aspect of the scuba diving resort will affect your trip. Look for a good destination and ensure that you have a good time!

Then you get the chance to go on a scuba diving package. This could be a trip with Regal Dive to the Red Sea to shore dive from a hotel base in Marsa Alam. Alternatively it could be a live-aboard trip to the Deep South to try to encounter the big pelagic species – sharks and manta rays. You might get the chance for some Far Eastern diving in Phuket, or the Barrier Reef.

Wherever you are able to go, a scuba diving package means that the transport, accomodation and diving are all included in the holiday. This means that to get the most out of the trip you will probably do most if not all of the available dives that are on offer. This can mean up to four dives a day. I have even heard of some operators that allow five or unlimited dives, but I consider that it would be difficult to get more than four good and safe dives into one day unless you were simply splashing around in the shallows!

A weeks holiday with a scuba diving package can mean that you quickly add around 20 dives to your log book. In addition to having a fantastic time it also quickly launches you into the next experience level of your diving career. You will feel that after a week, your diving skills will have been well honed after the intensive diving routine. Your buoyancy skills will be better and you will probably find that you are more relaxed in the water.

Now with 50 or more dives in your log book you may find it easier to get onto the more experienced dives that are being planned by your club. Your added experience allows you to move to the next stage of your formal training and your diving takes on a new and interesting slant – it starts to become more challenging and more rewarding. An investment in a scuba dive package holiday can certainly help you to move your diving up a notch!

The Yorkshire Regional Coaching scheme was putting on a Combined Nitrox event so we both booked ourselves onto it. The combined event would not only run over the basics of nitrox diving again and extend our knowledge up to using 50% nitrox for decompression, but also provide some teaching of the skills and discipline needed for more adventurous diving. As the scheduled weekend approached we realized that we would need a tank of nitrox for at least one of the practical sessions.  As we both normally dived on air this meant that we needed to get our tanks cleaned in order that they could be filled with an appropriate gas mix.  Now with only a week to go before the course our only option was to drop the tanks off at Capernwray for service the Sunday before and collect them a week later on the morning they would be needed.  Good excuse to sneak in an extra couple of dives the weekend before the course!

Finally we found ourselves on our way to Doncaster, where the Regional Coach Nick Kay lived.  He was giving the first theory part of the course to five students at his home.  So it was back to school again as we reviewed Dalton’s law of partial pressures and the affects of gases on the human body.  Two of the students were already diving with twinsets and naturally the talk at break times was all about what make of wing to buy and whether or not to go the minimalist DIR route!  The first day ended with a test that involved calculator and tables but everybody passed with flying colours.
The next day found us traveling over to Capernwray for the practical part of the course.  We set off from York in the dark with rain pouring down.  By the time we had got half way it had turned to snow and we were not looking forward to the day.  The previous Sunday my good dry suit had been at Divers Warehouse having a cuff dump fitted and I had used my old suit which had flooded.  My good suit was back from Otter now but I still had lingering memories of a cold wet day!  However, when we arrived at the quarry it was quite dry and things began to look up.  After a cup of coffee and a briefing we were split into groups.  I was buddied with another Nick from a Leeds club under instructor Nick Kay’s watchful eye (there were a lot of Nicks on the course). We kitted up and walked down to the training slipway where we did our buddy checks. Nick Kay was using a rebreather because he apparently needed to get some hours in underwater for his next teaching qualification.  Not only did we have to check our buddy’s kit but we also had a whistle stop tour of rebreathers so we could assist him if there was a problem.  Then we swam into the training area and headed for an unoccupied six metre spot to start our drills.
We practiced regulator swapping and DSMB launching while hovering in mid water until it appeared that we were ready. Then it was off to fifteen metres for more of the same.  It seems that this “hovering” is serious business and it can’t be translated as meaning “stay roughly at the same depth”.  After we were shown a fixed deployment of DSMB from the roof of the old transit van at fifteen metres it was up to ten metres where the students were given the chance to deploy theirs.

We had been told to make sure we stayed at ten metres and didn’t sink or float away from this depth by more than half a metre.  It is not as easy as it sounds as our practice session the week before showed. Glance down while you are deploying and you suddenly find yourself back at fifteen metres.  The trick is to look straight ahead, using your buddy as a reference point if possible, so that you can stay nice and level while deploying your blob. The scary thing is that by the time you get to trimix training you really do have to remain static, and will fail the course if you move up or down by even ten centimetres!
With DSMBs up it was time to move to nine metres to practice regulator swapping again. This was simulating a gas switch at a decompression stop at nine metres.  After this it was up to six metres for more of the same, then three metres and finally at one metre just below the surface.
All this filled up a (happily for me bone dry) forty five minute dive and then it was surface swim back to the slipway where we did a weight check with empty cylinders.  I was using a light ten litre tank that I had breathed down to 50 bar and yet I was able to shed two kilos of weight and still sink!
We dekitted and shot back to the café for our debrief and to discuss the second assessment dive coming up. This is the time when a hot cup of coffee never tastes so good.  The next dive was to be on nitrox and now was the time to pick up our tanks from Capernwray’s service department “Breathe Easy”.  After recovering from the shock of the service bill which included oxygen clean, visual inspection and 36% nitrox fill (£55) we were back in the quarry for a repeat of this mornings exercise but now under “exam” conditions.  Everything went as well as could be expected and forty minutes later we were clambering out for the second time that day, again dreaming about the hot cup of coffee to come.
I think the course has assisted with my buoyancy and underwater orientation skills tremendously.  It has made me think about my configuration and weighting and I have picked up loads of great tips from others on the course.  It has also made me think about what I want out of my diving.  I don’t necessarily want to dive to 100 metres in the dark in the UK, but I do want to do the sort of dives I am already qualified as a dive leader to do (up to 50 metres), but for longer, safer and much more comfortably than I could at the moment.

The next step?  Definitely the Extended Range Diving course already penciled in for next year.  In the mean time I really will have to hit Ebay hard, to sell as much stuff as I can to be able to afford the twin set and wings in the New Year.