What I did on my holidays

[shermarama]

I went to Portland for the first big diving trip of the year. I've never been there before, although I've been quite close, taking the south coast route to Cornwall including the huge long wall with the impressive gates in somewhere north of Poole. Portland itself is an odd little lump of rock barely connected to the mainland; it feels like it must be some remote and rustic place, although the price of the beer soon reminds you you're still in the south. The connection is a causeway road on a bit of scrappy land and a huge heap of pebbles known as Chesil Beach. The beach is bigger and much more impressive than the road. Most of us were staying in a place that used to be the Port Admiral's residence and is now a cheap hostel, with bunk beds, stern notices about locking windows and which rooms you can eat in, a functioning kitchen with disposable cutlery and plates, and happily some decent showers.

The weather was about as kind as weather can possibly be for divers at Easter, but the water was still only 9 degrees C. My undersuit actually wasn't enough to keep me warm, once the time spent hanging around being damp in a moving boat was factored in - I've started making an extra fitted fleece underlayer already, but I had to use my normal hooded fleece on the spot, and the excess fabric meant an extra 3kg of weight. Between all the neoprene on my extremities and all the fluff inside the suit, I think I had eighteen and a half kilos of lead strapped to me to keep me underwater, not to mention the weight of the scuba gear itself. It's no wonder I was finding it tricky to stand up in it all at one point.

Other features of the weekend:

• Long drives to and fro with a very sarcastic and musically opinionated Londoner and a normally very talkative Geordie, who it turns out goes comatose the second you put him in a car, which was slighty inconvenient when he was meant to be mapreading. The car journey was quite fun, actually. The sarcastic Londoner will from this time forwards will refer to Neil Fallon as Mr. Shouty, decided he liked The Melvins and Les Breastfeeders, and reckons that Art Brut owe quite a lot to Half Man Half Biscuit
• A total of seven dives, of which two were in terrible vis, one being so bad in terms of vis and surge it was aborted after six minutes, four I got quite cold on because of insufficient fluff, one I got quite cold on due to a leak in my air inlet which let a good couple of pints of cold seawater into my suit, and one on which I was actually fine
• Scallops! I picked one from the seabed myself, and others were collecting some, and I learnt how to open and clean them, and we had them fried with ginger and garlic for a teatime snack
• Watching the sun set over Chesil Beach - one night from the yard outside the pub, another night from the summit of the beach while eating Chinese takeaway
• Peculiar diving sights including an odd fish that I must find some way to work out the identity of - it was black and neon blue and didn't look like it had any right being in UK waters. Also a leg. This was on top of the bombardon unit, itself a difficult object to decipher, being a device invented to try and calm waves on the invasion beaches in WW2. The leg seemed to be larger than lifesize, looking like old carved and painted wood, with a vaguely nautical-looking boot on - I can't imagine where that can have come from.
• Lots of sitting around in the sunshine waiting for things, interspersed with periods of frantic activity and copious amounts of eating.

And I'm going back again, not this weekend but next. I've done all the pool work and most of the theory for my next qualification, Sports Diver, but next weekend it's time to do all the skills in real cold water. There are going to be 19 trainees, the vast majority of whom do not own a drysuit and are going to be fecking freezing in rented wetsuits. My drysuit smugness may be slightly impaired, however; it turns out that tight-fitting latex seals can do some quite scary-looking damage to the delicate skin of the female neck, and I look like I've been garotted. Still. Inflatable clothes!