I just spent a week back in England. It was surprisingly sunny but gosh, was it cold. I met lots of nice people who were all going diving on the weekend and they kindly asked me along. They enticed me with tales of ice cold murky fresh water, or slightly warmer but even murkier salt water including a 20 minute ride on the club RIB in a force 5. I politely declined. When it’s single figures outside, the shower is more than wet enough. Even though I learnt to dive on the south coast of England when I was a lad, I just can’t do drysuits anymore. It’s a Freudian childhood thing.

In those pre-PADI / James Bond days, the final part of the diving course was called a ‘mud run’. This mile long rite of passage through thigh-high stinking brown sludge was designed to test one’s stamina and endurance, qualities that would surely be required to dive to the Oceans’ depths as a macho ‘frogman’ with lots of tanks, spanners and a big knife. Furthermore, this expedition across the mudflats had to be completed before the tide came in whilst wearing a drysuit. Those of us that finished were freezing, sweaty, hot, sticky and slimy all at the same time, trapped in foul smelling drysuits with no zip. Yes. We had finally obtained the desired qualities of a frog-like man. Since that day, I have never worn a drysuit again.

Perhaps it was the enthusiasm of youth, but I then continued to dive in a wetsuit around the Cornish coast in weather that would have sunk the Titanic. We’d bounce off the top of 4 foot waves in the Dory whilst staring hopefully at a compass, only to arrive at some lonely rock after an hour, purely by the grace of God. We would then proceed to plummet to the depths of the continental shelf in twinsets and scrabble around in the sand looking for bits of rusty metal and lobsters. Having drained our tanks of air, we’d climb back up the rock ready for the ride home under gray skies and and whipping winds – just for fun. It wasn’t until I went to Malta for a family holiday some years later, that I discovered water was blue and you could hover in it – in a pair of Speedos to boot. Then, I came to Sharm and a new minimum standard was set. It’s not that I couldn’t dive in a gravel pit again, or even in the English Channel. It’s just that I’d rather not.