diving.

I was working at Eurobet at the time, with money to spend and weekends genuinely free — a combination that doesn't come round twice. Two dives every Saturday, two every Sunday, for the best part of a year, plus a night dive on the Seven Sisters every other Thursday. For a couple of months in the autumn of 2001, Sunday mornings became a drift dive around Europa Point instead of the usual pair.

Colder water, a dry suit, and some of the best wreck diving in Europe on the doorstep: the Sound of Mull, the Firth of Lorn and the Sound of Luing most days, and in the summer, longer runs out to Coll, Caliach Point and as far as Skerryvore.

An eighteen-guest liveaboard working out of St Maarten — formerly Peter Hughes' Sea Dancer, refitted in 2002 with a bigger dive deck. The week ran Saba first, then Statia, then St Kitts and Nevis: four dives in daylight and a dusk or night dive to finish.

Straight off the boat and into the busiest job I've had in diving: try dives, PADI Open Water courses, Advanced and Rescue, one after another, every day. Every try dive was at Little Church. On top of the day's diving I ran 29 night courses, three evenings each, at the Temple and Little Church, and 17 deep courses, all of them on the Cliff. Giorgos Kostas was my divemaster the whole way through, and he left when I did. I lasted a few months; it wore me out.

The club week in Port St Mary gave me the dive I remember above all the others. On the SS Liverpool my buddy was taken ill at our first decompression stop, and I recovered him from 31 metres in what became an epic bounce dive; we both went to the Isle of Man decompression chamber, and we both made full recoveries. The two days that followed were the gentlest diving I have ever done: with the most amazing “Doc”, never more than 5 metres deep, down for over three hours at a time, hunting nudibranchs and photographing macro life. Back on the mainland, Wast Water meant two dives an evening — a deep dive first, teaching club members to 55 metres of fresh water, then a night dive along the shore at 6 metres.

2005 was the year I really got to grips with technical diving — TDI Master Gas Blender in February, then, in one April weekend, ITDA Trimix Diver, Rebreather Diver on the Megalodon, and Master Gas Blender Instructor and Instructor Trainer. Scapa Flow that August was where it came together: a week on the fleet that scuttled itself on 21 June 1919, three König-class battleships and four cruisers lying between 12 and 45 metres, each one a scheduled monument you can look at but never touch.

The Shadow Divers were eight divers and a skipper, and my job was the gas: every mix, every fill. In May 2006 we spent a fortnight trying to dive the Lusitania and the conditions beat us every day; in July we went back and made three visits, most of them more than eight hours in the water. After that I retired from teaching and dived for the enjoyment of it — the Norfolk coast that autumn, then a thin 2007: Wast Water every three months, local dives in Norfolk and Suffolk, and a week on the Isle of Man revisiting the old sites (without the shallows with Doc, this time). The team went to Sharm el-Sheikh in the first week of June 2007, 2008 and 2009. Most of it was on the rebreather.

More than eleven years after I left, I went back to Dive Charters and picked up where I'd left off: two boat dives every Sunday, and for once none of them teaching. The Rosslyn, the Excellent and the Seahawk were all still there, joined by two tugs sunk as artificial reefs, La Buchana and, in March 2015, the Sun Swale. I didn't dive at all in 2017. The last Sunday of the run was 8 March 2020; Covid restrictions, and a few other things, kept me out of the water for the next four years.

Back in the water, a little further up the coast. The rota ran Punta Chullera, El Galeón, Torre de la Sal, Marina del Este and Las Lajas, then round again — Marina del Este being the trip east to La Herradura, on the Costa Tropical.