Do you remember your first time?

Written by staff reporter Tuesday, 14 October 2008 00:00

Trevor Norton Illus: Ian Legge JP Trenque Illus: Ian Legge Clare Peddie John Boyle Phil Nuytten Illus: Ian Legge Clive Cussler Mike Pitts Illus: Ian Legge Peter Scoones Phil Short Tony Robinson Illus: Ian Legge Innes McCartney Mensun Bound

The fact is that we all take up diving with different motivations, and each of us face our own challenges as we take the first faltering fin strokes.

So for a glimpse of how it was for some of today’s high-profile divers, we have compiled some of their early scuba memories. Interestingly, there is one noticeable symptom of a generation gap: those who learned in the 1950s or 60s often have wild tales about homemade kit and self-teaching, while subsequent generations have enjoyed easier access to formal scuba tuition.

PROFESSOR TREVOR NORTON
Marine Biologist and Author

‘Inspired by Hans and Lotte Hass, I went snorkelling and saw a completely new world. The thing that really impressed me was the amount of wildlife. You don’t see badgers and foxes cavorting in the open when you walk through an English meadow, but underwater, it was as if the fish had come out to greet me.

‘I didn’t train formally until 1960, when I did a BSAC course at university. We trained in Victorian swimming baths: I was good at sinking, but swimming was not my forte. When it came to the old test of swimming a length of the pool while wearing a weight belt, I covered most of the distance underwater. They thought I was showing off.’

JP TRENQUE
Chairman, British Society of Underwater Photographers

‘When my father learned to dive, I immediately wanted to put on a tank to follow him in his undersea adventures. One summer, when I was eight or nine, my parents bought me a child’s snorkelling kit to play with on the beach. Although I loved looking through my mask while swimming on the surface, I couldn’t stay submerged so I decided to build my own scuba unit.

‘I reckoned my Space Hopper would carry enough air for me to be able to breathe for a while. I attached the foot pump’s tube to the balloon’s valve and started breathing from it. Unfortunately, my parents weren’t as proud of my invention as I would have hoped and confiscated my ‘bounce-alung’. From then on, I started attending the local dive club’s training sessions and soon ended up doing giant stride entries in the pool with a proper cylinder that was almost heavier than me!’

CLARE PEDDIE
BSAC Chair

‘My early experiences of learning to dive were not my best. Looking back, I now realise that I am a natural nose breather (something which became really apparent when I learned how to use a closed-circuit rebreather and had to stop!) – in my training, I just could not master being underwater without my mask on. Without the mask to stop me sniffing in water, I just started to get water up my nose uncontrollably, and I would end up back on the surface coughing, spluttering and feeling very inadequate.

‘At the time, the training required you to snorkel several lengths without a mask. The only way I could achieve this without inhaling water was to swim along holding my nose and hoping the instructor didn’t notice. My instructor got really frustrated with me and at one point told me to give up, as I would never make a diver – which resulted in me hiding in the showers in tears. Eventually, after several hours in the pool, I did master mask clearing – although, I have to say, it was an embarrassingly long time into my diving career before I could say I was comfortable performing the task.’

JOHN BOYLE
Film-Maker

‘It all started when I was 17, on one of many trips to County Kerry in southwest Ireland, where I enjoyed fishing off the Skelligs. The skipper of the boat, Joe Roddy, was a diver, and would emerge from the water with armfuls of crayfish. I was very keen on fishing, but fishermen only ever see the opaque surface of the sea, and I wanted more. I wanted to know what it looked like down there, and Joe said that the best way would be to find out for myself.

‘Well, I didn’t train, as such. I borrowed Joe’s kit and bought my own when I got back to England. It was 1971. I used the equipment whenever I returned to Ireland during college holidays and family weekends. I was absolutely hooked. I didn’t feel the need to do deep dives, but was always happy pottering about in a bay, just watching creatures in the shallows. I remember being mesmerised by the sight of a school of pollack feeding on sand eels.’

CLIVE CUSSLER
Novelist and Wreck-Hunter

‘It started when I was in the US Air Force, back during the Korean War. Our job was to fly supplies over to Korea, and then fly the wounded back. During this period, I spent a lot of time on layovers at Guam and Midway, and we started doing spear fishing. Well, we heard about Cousteau’s invention, so I wrote to him and he gave me a price in francs. I sent him a cheque, and quite a few months later, the aqualung arrived. I was an airbase in Hawaii, and we had a compressor that filled the cylinder to about 500psi. Not ideal, but it got us under the water.

‘I trained much later, when I started to write seriously and wanted a little job to keep me going. My wife saw an ad in a local paper asking for a clerk in a dive shop in Orange County, California, so I applied. I got the job, but they had to train me officially so that I could help their clients. After a few weeks, they said there was nothing more they could show me.’

PHIL NUYTTEN
Canadian Submersible Inventor

‘When I was young, it was my dream to become a totem pole carver (bear with me here!). I served a sort of apprenticeship aged ten, and eventually became good enough to get commissions. One of my first jobs was to create a totem pole with marine creatures, so I went to the aquarium to research the job, and found a new fascination. Also, I read a book on what was known in Canada as ‘goggle fishing’ [spearing fish underwater while wearing goggles or a mask], and it seemed to me that this was the thing to do.

‘As far as diving goes, I’m self-taught. In 1951, I decided to build my own kit. I built my first rudimentary rebreather at the age of 11 or 12 after getting hold of a copy of the famous book Deep Diving and Submarine Operations by JS Haldane, which remains something of a bible.’

MIKE PITTS
Underwater Cameraman

‘I first got interested during a family holiday in the Baltic, when I was eight. We were camping, and the guy in the tent next to us had one of those snorkels with a ping-pong ball in it. As soon as I got the hang of using a mask and snorkel, I was hooked.

‘I actually trained at a military BSAC club affiliated to Reading BSAC. I enjoyed it, but there was a real demarcation between the military members and the main club. We were the oiks from the army, quite different to the nice boys from the local college. My first dives were in a gravel pit in Oxshott.’

PETER SCOONES
Underwater Cameraman

‘The television programmes of Hans Hass inspired me as a child. I knew I wanted to do something similar, but it wasn’t until I got to Singapore with the RAF that I managed to get under the water. While there, colleagues in the Navy unofficially taught us to dive using oxygen rebreathers.

‘My first ever dive was in Singapore. The visibility was terrible, but I saw some batfish, gorgonian coral and even a few reef sharks. Sharks, for heaven’s sake! It was an astonishing experience, because I had presumed that you had to be some sort of superman to indulge in the same activities as Hans Hass, yet there I was. Seeing fish and coral in the water for myself was amazing, but these days such experiences are poured over people like a shower.’

PHIL SHORT
Cave Diver

‘I turned to diving through sheer frustration at travelling long distances in dry caves, only to have to turn away whenever I reached a flooded section. So I started playing around with small cylinders in plunge pools, and bought some basic kit from dive shops. It was just a matter of getting my head wet, really. Then I realised it would be prudent to learn properly.

‘I did a PADI open-water course with Steve Axtell of Diving Leisure Unlimited in Poole, and carried out my first official dives in Stoney Cove in February. The weather was too horrible to go to the sea. It was 4°C in Stoney, and I was wearing a badly fitting wetsuit with no seals and holes in the knees. It wasn’t even a semi-dry! Strangely enough, I didn’t notice the cold until after the dive. Why? Because I was having such a great time.’

TONY ROBINSON
Actor and Television Presenter

‘I had a new girlfriend, and we decided to go on holiday to the Seychelles. We were facing the prospect of spending a fortnight together at a point when we had only been going out for a short time. So we decided to try to achieve some sort of goal while there, and diving seemed a great idea.

‘What you have to understand is that I consider myself the worst diver in the world, even after 200 dives. Back when I started, it was even worse. I did a week’s course and I wanted to be like those fearless beach gods who were doing the course with me, but it wasn’t to be. Half of me believes that fear of my own incompetence is a good thing, but the other half has a bit of pride. Why should I look like a wally when everyone else is fantastic? Anyway, I’m glad to say I completed the course and got my card.’

INNES McCARTNEY
Submarine Hunter

‘A friend of mine, Rob Simpson, took up diving when he went to live in Plymouth, and it prompted me to get off my backside and do the same. I’d always been vaguely interested in diving, but I just needed that little nudge to get me going.
‘In 1989, I trained at the BSAC school at Fort Bovisand, Plymouth. Shortly after, I joined the BSAC branch in High Wycombe. I enjoyed the training, but my best memory was of diving my first wreck: the James Eagan Layne. Being trained in history, I found it pretty cool to dive the sort of vessel I had come across in my studies. I didn’t go into diving with wrecks in mind, but after that first dive there was no holding me back.’

MENSUN BOUND
Maritime Archaeologist

‘When you grow up in the Falkland Islands as I did, you practically live on the sea. Falklanders are voracious readers, and one of the books that I read was Jacques Cousteau’s Silent World, in which he tells of a Mediterranean wreck dive where the divers found ‘marble statuary and bronze figures scattered across the floor as if they had been deck cargo’.

I was inspired, and years later I rediscovered the wreck, which lies off the Tunisian town of Mahdia.

‘I officially qualified with Oxford University’s BSAC club back in 1979. The training was good, but more importantly, I met my wife, Jo. I was doing laps and it was impossible to keep up with her! I thought I was a useless swimmer, but later discovered that Jo had been a schoolgirl swimming champion.’