MONTY: Comtemplating the winter ahead

The dark days of winter are upon us, with many of us cramming our dive kit into bags and boxes for the next few months. This has been an interesting exercise for me this year as my gear is completely stuffed, tested to destruction, knackered beyond repair. I have therefore promised myself an entirely new setup.

As Isaak Walton once noted, ‘A fisherman is happiest by the river or in the fishing store’ – substitute ‘fisherman’, ‘river’ and ‘fishing store’ with ‘diver’, ‘sea’ and ‘dive shop’, and you get a decent summation of the average diver’s relationship with new kit. I intend to emerge into the spring sunshine like a butterfly from a chrysalis, resplendent and shiny, beeping and whirring with the very latest gadgets. I’m even going to read some of the manuals for the gear, which is of course a complete betrayal of my manhood – like asking for directions or enjoying a Hugh Grant film.

It seems to me a very good time to take stock, the British winter. Let’s face it – and I’m aware I’ll unleash a torrent of angry mail here – diving over the next few months off our own shores is, as a rule, not overwhelmingly terrific. You can get the odd good day (and any day with a dive in it should be classified as pretty good), but losing all feeling in the lower half of your face and getting excited because you glimpsed your own fin in the murk doesn’t really put us in the diving premier league for the next six months or so.

That’s not to say the entire, delightfully absurd business is any less attractive over the winter. There’s something deeply appealing about a group of people who insist on charging about the country, spending appreciable amounts of money in the process, to claw their way through enfolding murk for 40 minutes, then get home with the weekend nearly over, only to struggle through the next few days so they can do it all again. Some things don’t really survive rational analysis, and demand that you just go with the sensation without asking what the actual point of it could be. Like jazz… or Boris Johnson.

As I type these words, I’ve had a horrible revelation. Do you know, I get as much pleasure from a dive in January at the National Diving and Activity Centre in Chepstow as I do from drifting with giant ocean sunfish over a reef in Bali? Does this mean I’m a real diving purist? Or that I’m a drooling simpleton? Anyone looking at me right now as I thump the keyboard in the little café where I write in Bristol will note that my expression is troubled, and may remain so for a few days.

Anyway, the point I’m driving at is that the short days, rolling dark skies and general malaise of a British winter should be an excellent time to figure out, and gently investigate, what you would like to do with your diving in the coming season. We so often start the spring doing precisely what we’ve done for the last few years – rolling over the side of the club boat doing the same old dive as ever.

How about investigating photography over the winter, honing your skills so come the crystal dives at the height of summer, you really know how to take a great image? How about researching a wreck ready for some extensive dives on it over the warmer months? How about planning an expedition way beyond the normal bimble of a dive weekend?

Some of the finest evenings I can remember have been spent hunched over a chart in a pub, the fire spitting, pints glowing, and faces shining with the prospect of great adventures. Of course, most never come off, but so often the planning process itself is life-affirming, allowing your imagination to take flight and visit the most unlikely places.

It’s even better if other people in the pub overhear you, because you can then watch the realisation dawn on them that they aren’t divers, so don’t get to go on great adventures, and are therefore rather dull.

For me, the winter will consist of wrestling with the mysteries of underwater photography yet again, which we all know is a mystical art steeped in witchcraft and sorcery. Happily, this coincides neatly with my resolution to spend astronomical sums of money on kit, meaning that next year I shall still be taking bad photographs, but doing so with nicer lenses.

Enjoy the winter, filled as it should be with plans, dreams, and the vision of the diver you will be in summer 2009.