MONTY: Revisiting his neglected rebreather

I am a bloke. This means that I do certain things, most of them faintly idiotic and fuelled by some ancient desire to alpha-male my way out of most situations I come across. I never, for example, ask for directions, even when there is overwhelming evidence that I’m hopelessly lost. This, I believe, stems from an ancient instinct to avoid losing face in front of the other alpha members of the tribe – which is all well and good when hunting woolly mammoths, but not so pertinent when trying to find a nice B&B in the South Hams. I still can’t do it, though – it would obviously emasculate me in the most dramatic and instant fashion. Where the inability to wrestle a duvet into its cover, wrap a parcel, or put a loo seat down stems from, I’ve no idea, but I’m sure there’s a splendid evolutionary reason why men can’t do these things and women can.

What blokes also do is buy stuff because it’s big, shiny, new, cool, and would obviously help with the woolly mammoth problem. A characteristic they share with toddlers is that they want this big, shiny, new, cool thing RIGHT NOW. Whether they use it afterwards is faintly irrelevant – to be one WITH everything, you have to have one OF everything. Obviously.

Which leads me neatly onto my rebreather. I bought it a couple of years ago in a frenzy of macho hubris. This was, I decided, a piece of kit that was the absolute answer to all my diving woes. I’d be nose to nose with furiously displaying cuttlefish before you could say ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year’, going on to shyly accept yet another award at a glittering ceremony. This I would cram onto my groaning shelves at home, between the Golden Pandas, the BAFTAs and various Lifetime Services to Photography trophies.

Problem is, you need to stay current with rebreathers, and I didn’t. It was nice to look at and doubtless raised my stature in the tribe, but it’s essentially a bit of equipment designed to get something done. It was the ‘getting something done’ bit that somehow passed me by. After the initial heady flush of oxygen-rich usage, I went back to open-circuit because it was more convenient – I didn’t persist, and my skills, such as they were, quickly became redundant.

Fortunately, I seem to have recently fallen among thieves. At an industry party a while back, I found myself chatting to a group of hairy-bummed rebreather divers and an underwater cameraman. The conversation abounded with f-stops, deep stops and oxtox hits at 90m with a conger tangled in your crotch strap and one of your lungs vibrating like an old Hoover bag. Brilliant. They invited me to come on a dive with them, and – maddened by too much cheap wine – I said yes.

A few weeks later, I found myself kitting up with the delightful Hugh and Kat next to their van (I have to get one). This they opened to reveal an Aladdin’s cave of beeping, whirring, jet-black strappiness that made me gawk like a small boy with his nose pressed against the sweetshop window. We were diving at good old Eastern Kings on Plymouth Hoe (a terrific dive if you are ever in that neck of the woods), and duly shuffled to the water’s edge. Hugh and Kat vanished silently into the gloom, while Antje and I pootled around the 15m mark. Our most exciting moment was when Antje – who is at an early stage of her drysuit career – saw a scallop and bent over for a closer look. This led to her feet making a bid for freedom, then me hanging onto her in a cloud of silt as her booties swelled to Sideshow Bob dimensions, leading in turn to an entertaining couple of minutes before she managed to right herself, her head having ploughed a neat furrow in the sea bed. She made me promise not to mention this little hiccup to anyone after the dive, by the way, so keep that story to yourselves.

It dawned on me after the dive – what with Antje’s buoyant feet, Hugh and Kat’s constant attention to their training and development, and, indeed, my criminal neglect of my rebreather – that in diving, we never stop learning. If we neglect a skill, or a bit of kit, or a discipline, it becomes defunct extremely quickly. No diver is ever the finished article, and there’s no substitute for getting the water, developing your skills through regular use and repetition. That’s why, this summer, there’ll be no more impulse buying.

I shall be breaking out my rebreather and starting afresh, visiting my regular dive sites around the UK and learning it all once again. It’ll be fun because I’ll be in my van.