Sorry about the lack of finishing the other post until today. I’ve been rather busy. Anyway, here’s day 2…

We didn’t have anything for breakfast apart from a Cadbury’s cake bar. We got to the lake at about the same time and kitted up straight away. It was time for the deep dive: 25m. The plan was to go down the ramp to the depth and then have a look at a colour chart. Colours go the deeper you go down, the first of which is red. We should have been able to see that change. We were also going to look at a bottle filled with air to see what happened as it descended, and a polystyrene cup.

We got in via the bus stop and started our descent. Martin had to abort as his alternate air source was broken. It got a lot colder at 16m; there was a thermocline. Once we reached the bottom we got in a circle. It was darker; really quite creepy. I felt like I was out of breath. It was weird. I was cold and my wetsuit was tight against me thanks to the pressure. My air was being squashed too. It felt like I wasn’t getting any; I felt suffocated. It was horrible. I jumped at Dave and signalled to go up. We skipped out the decompression safety stop as I was panicking, which meant we were vulnerable to DCI, decompression illness. We got to the surafce and he reassured me I had done the right thing. I was worried that Mum would be worried, but she was okay. I went up to the van alone, Dave stayed to wait for the others. I met up with Martin and he helped me get my kit off. I explained what was wrong to him and Steve.

It was only after the others got back that I found out I’d put Andy in a tricky situation. Debra (another Divemaster) was helping on that dive too, but her ears failed to equalise, so she stayed in the shallower water. With her and Martin out, when I took Dave, Andy was left on his own in deeper water with 4 students, which would not have been good if someone else had a problem. Luckily though, they were all fine.

After something to eat, we sorted out another wetsuit option for me. The one I had was too tight in deeper water, so we were trying to find something else. I borrowed the legs from Steve’s daughter, Ellie’s, suit, but the top half was too tight, which is the same problem as the other one. That’s what I get for being slender with a slightly-larger-than-average-for-my-size bust! I ended up with the legs of Ellie’s suit and the top half of another girl, Briony’s. It fitted, I just looked silly.

For the next dive, I went down with just Andy. We descended in the same place as the others, who were doing a wreck dive, but I went down to the bottom next to the wreck to complete my aborted deep dive. It was amazing. The red on the card had gone brown, and the bottle was completely crushed. Andy and I then ascended a bit and had a brief look round the wreck before joining up with the others to ascend up the line. Andy pulled away from it to avoid Emily and Chris, so I followed him. He was really impressed with my safety stop as I hovered next to him for the whole three minutes. We surfaced, and did a surface swim back to the shore. We got out in the slipway and went back up and got de-kitted again.

I was showered with praise from Andy, as I didn’t panic and completed the dive, as well as ascended ‘perfectly’. I think the thing was that nobody had said what the breathing would be like. They’d said it would be cold, and dark, and harder to do things but nothing about breathing difficulties so I wasn’t expecting it. I was a lot better the second time.

The final dive, for me, was the wreck dive with Dave and Martin. Everyone else was finishing their Peak Performance Buoyancy specialty, which I didn’t have time to do as I aborted the first dive. I wasn’t too bothered about the specialty though. It just gives me an excuse to go back up and do more.

I descended in the same place as we had for my deep dive. We explored the wreck; it was awesome. It was a bit eerie and dark, but it was cool to think about it. I then had to show that I could find the rope again, but we then went off the bow along the anchor line back to the cockpit. We stopped at the 7m shelf for our safety stop and Dave signalled for me to swim around a bit. I followed a shoal of roach and found two massive perch. I swam slowly to get closer and managed to get nose to nose with a foot-long perch. I was so happy.

After the dive, we went up to the bar to do our log books and debreif, and fill out all our qualification forms. After that, we went out to the car park and got some pictures taken of us with Debra and Andy, as everyone else had left.

We said goodbye and set off home. I saw Toby that night after my shower. He came round and we watched Top Gear, as always on a Sunday.

It was a brilliant weekend. I loved it.