I’d been down to the dive shop the day before to to pick up my gear. I chose the wetsuit option; a drysuit would have been dryer and warmer but, according to our instructor Landon, drysuit newbies have a tendency to uncontrollably shoot feet first toward the surface, as the air in the suit bubbles towards their ankles. I had no particular desire to die such an ignominious death, leaving a corpse with exploded lungs and zeppelin ankles bobbing flippers up in the bay, so I chose instead to suffer the peculiarly acrid smell of sweat, salt water and sloughed-off skin which only a rental wetsuit can provide.

We arrived at Whytecliffe Park around 8, lugging our cylinders down to the shore and following Landon up onto a cliff overlooking the bay as he pointed out useful landmarks. It was a lovely place, a tiny green cove with a pebbled beach and dramatic cliff-sides backed by an unbroken line of trees. It was cool but warming up, and by the time we’d all squeezed into our wetsuits and BCDs, I was sweating like a hot person in a thick wetsuit and couldn’t wait to get into the allegedly arctic water.

Shane, our group’s assigned instructor, had us wade into the water and help each other get our fins on. We walked in gingerly over the slimy rocks, the water seeping in over the tops of our boots and then creeping up inside our suits. Happily, the 14mm of neoprene which had brought me to the edge of hyperthermia on the beach kept things nice and temperate in the chilly water, and we all bobbed comfortably just off shore with our BCDs inflated to keep us upright.

All, that is, except my buddy Amanda. (Who am I kidding? I don’t remember her name at all, but I’m pretty sure it had an ‘A’ in it. I’m a bad person.) Amanda flopped and floundered around in shallower water, trying to sit on the rocks to put on her fins and being constantly buffetted by the gentle waves. “Go in deeper!” Shane shouted.

“I can’t get my fins on!” she replied.

“I know,” he told her. “Go in deeper so you float!”

Eventually Amanda floated out to join us. I’d managed to pull on my own fins on by this point, and I helped her get hers on. “Did you try these on before?” I asked. “They seem a bit loose.”

“Yah, it’s fine, it’s fine. I tried them on earlier.”

(A beat.)

“I’ve lost a flipper! Where is it?” she wailed.

Shane, who had joined us by this time, stuck his face in the water, dropped out of sight for a second, and then resurfaced with the offending fin. “Tighten it,” he said through gritted teeth. I yanked the strap down as hard as I could, and we swam out to our dive float to do our various surface skills, towing each other to simulate ‘tired divers’, taking off and refitting our scuba gear, orally inflating our BCDs (pre-flight safety presentations do have a use after all) and so on. Shane gave us the thumbs-down and, one by one, we held up our inflator hoses, breathed out and deflated our BCDs to slide down into the murky water.

The change from above to below the surface is, for lack of a better word, mental. Everything changes the moment you submerge: the world contracts from the open air to a claustrophobic sphere of murkiness. The sound of wind and waves is replaced only by the hissing intake and bubbling exhalation of your breath. Your ears immediately start to complain of the increasing pressure. The sides of the mask intrude on your vision so that your field of view is impaired. I had the oddest feeling that my awareness of my body had retreated from my weightless limbs and now resided solely in my head, drawn there by the sensory shock of the cold water on my exposed face, the pressure in my ears and the comforting pocket of air in my mask.

It was a just little more intense than the swimming pool.

The sea in Malta had been clear and blue; here it was so green and opaque I felt like I could almost see the tiny particles of algae and plankton which gave it its colour. My mask fogged up almost instantly. I breathed in and out rapidly, the bubbles rushing past my ears; I descended hand over hand down the float’s orange anchor line and equalised each time my hand was free. I peered down through the condensation in my mask to try to pick out the bottom, and periodically I looked up to see the light at the surface grow fainter and the flippered legs of the other divers recede as I dropped along the cable. The bottom loomed up at about fifteen or twenty feet and I settled on my knees, sending a cloud of silt, and tried to relax. The sand and rocks beneath my knees afforded the situation a bit of solidity, and everything seemed a little less spacey and disconnected. Our instructors had talked about how it was possible to become disorientated in the deep ocean, where sometimes neither the bottom or the surface is visible, and even after this laughably shallow descent I could see how it could happen.

I tipped my mask down to swill some water around it; I tilted it back and exhaled to clear it, and took a look around.

And I couldn’t see anything. Flurries of silt were sent up anew each time another diver settled onto the bottom, and even as it cleared the water still presented a greenish wall not more than ten or fifteen feet off. The surface wasn’t visible as such, but there was a vaguely perceptible gradient to the brightness of the light above our heads. I sent Amanda an ‘OK’ sign, and she signed a twitchy ‘OK’ back. Details of our little orb of visibility became apparent. A few multi-armed sea stars, coloured a dusty orange (I suspect before we arrived they’d been simply ‘orange’), were scattered around. Little crabs danced sideways away from us. Tiny silver fish darted around. We’d arrived.

We went through the skills familiar from the pool sessions: dropping regulators; removing and replacing masks; sharing air with a buddy, and the rest. Things went remarkably smoothly for most of us. Amanda, cursed, perhaps, with birdlike hollow bones, had a tendency to float upwards slowly but uncontrollably, grabbing at whoever was nearest (me, mostly) to arrest her ascent. Of course, because the rest of us had more or less managed to achieve neutral buoyancy, the net result was for both of us to float off, Amanda clawing at her supposed saviour while I frantically tried to dump air out of my BCD and swim back down. Given that bad shit can happen on uncontrolled, panicked ascents — principally, one’s lungs can explode — I was less than happy about this. There is unfortunately not a standard hand signal for “Get to fuck.”

Anyway, we finished off our exercises and Shane motioned for us to follow him. We lurched off like a school of drunk turtles and made a short circuit of the bay, taking in a few more starfish and crabs, and then ascended with upraised arms and plinking ears to meet up by the buoy. “Nice work everyone,” said Shane. “No flippers lost?”

We finned to shore, struggled to our feet and staggered up the beach as the water drained out of our boots. One dive down, three to go. So stay tuned for parts 2, 3 and 4 of this diving epic — 4,000 more words about gripping undersea adventures!

(A beat.)

I kid, I kid. I wouldn’t put you through that. And besides, I still have an entire road trip’s worth of entries left to write about the west coast of the USA.

The rest of the weekend was pretty straightforward: another dive on Saturday afternoon (almost a replay of the first, down to Amanda losing a flipper on the way back to shore) and two more on Sunday and we were qualified Open Water divers. Simple as that!

I was shattered. And August still wasn’t over yet.

I’d met a guy called John at lunch in the office a few times. We’d chatted a bit about the Tour de France as it had been going on through August, and he’d mentioned that nearby Burnaby sported a fully enclosed velodrome. “I’ve been meaning to organise some beginners’ track lessons there, but we’ve always been one person short. Would you be interested?”

You’re damn skippy I was interested.

I turned up at the track after work on Friday, parked the car and pushed through the revolving doors*. The wooden track takes up the centre of the dome, leaving enough space at one side for changing rooms, offices and the like, but the corridor narrows down to barely a shoulder-width as it curves at the end. I followed voices along the curve under the eaves of the track, passing racks and racks of track bikes locked up under the banked corner, to find Pete, Monica and John already being fitted for their rental bikes. We were all kitted out in hilariously overcompensatory cycling clothing, and we were all shitting ourselves.

Claire, our instructor for the evening, picked out a bike for each of us — incredibly light Treks like this — and we wheeled them out through an underpass and into the centre of the track.

This was going to be scary.

The track is 200m long (too short for the Olympics, apparently) and is banked at 47° at each end. It’s the steepest track in North America, and if you don’t cycle at something like 30km/h around the corners then you fall off. It’s as simple as that. There were a few riders up there already, caning round and round to an astonishing cacophony of noises: tyres hummed over the lacquered wood, and the track creaked and groaned as the riders flew over it.

Claire explained the markings on the track to us: the côte d’azur, or ‘on-ramp’ at the bottom; just above it, the metre-wide sprinter’s lane bordered by a pair of red and black lines, and the blue stayer’s line about halfway further up. It seemed impossibly distant. “That’s where you wait during the Madison,” she told us. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you up there — and a bit higher — before the end of the night.”

We had a few laps of the côte d’azur to get used to our brakeless, fixed-gear bikes. The rationale here is that if track bikes did have brakes, all it would take is one twitchy rider in the pack to brake suddenly and there would be a massive pile-up. The consequence is that slowing down is much, much harder; you have to let your legs continue to move with the pedals but apply a bit of pressure as they come up from bottom dead centre. It’s possible to just lock your legs up, but do it with enough determination and the still-rotating pedals will catapult you up and over the handlebars†. I came close a couple of times.

After that we were encouraged up onto the straights, then back to the côte d’azur for the corners and eventually, once we felt we had enough speed, up onto the track for the whole lap. The sensation is exhilarating, and mortifying. With ten or twelve beginners on the track, our speeds were all over the place: some riders were caning round as if to the velodrome born; others were creeping around with tyres squeaking in protest at the lack of speed in the corners. Claire had explained some track racing etiquette — call out “Stick!” as you approach someone to overtake, or let them know whether you’re passing them on the inside or outside, for example — and rounding a corner was terrifying mixture of wall-of-death speed and dodgem manoeuvering. “Stick!” I’d yell. “Jesus — stick!” as a laggard ambled round in front of me, barely fast enough to keep from sliding off the track. All the while, the more gung ho riders shot by with an airy whoosh and occasionally a whoop of glee.

We went on to experiment with pace lines, where a team of four cyclists circle the track in single file, the front rider each lap peeling off to the back of the pack. We yo-yo’d forward and back like a horizontal slinky; no brakes might prevent sudden stops but it doesn’t make it any easier to keep a constant speed. After that, Claire led the entire gaggle up to the top of the track for a flying 200 metres, where you hurtle down to the sprinter’s lane by the infield for a flying lap. These were exercising enough, but finally we moved onto Madison drills.

The Madison is a slightly bizarre race between teams of two riders: one rider rests above the blue stayer’s line, cycling slowly to conserve their energy, while the other races around the sprinter’s lane at the bottom. When the pair swap over, the racing rider transfers some of his momentum to his teammate by linking hands and slinging him forward. We weren’t going to try this (most of us were still astonished by every lap we managed to complete without injury or mishap), but we were going to get part of the way there. First, Claire told us, “You’re going to be riding with your hands in the drops. No using the flat bits on top. Take one hand off the bars on the straights, then put it back on for the corners. When you’re happy with that, try riding an entire lap with just one hand. Then do the same with the other.”

Okay, okay, we nodded.

“And then, you’re going to pair up. One rider is going to stay on the black line” — as in, the 2-inch-wide strip of black tape at the top of the metre-wide sprinter’s lane — “and the other has the whole of the sprinter’s lane to move around in. The second rider will stay slightly behind the first, and rest their right hand on the first rider’s back. For one whole lap.”

I know this doesn’t sound difficult. Reading it now, it sounds like a piece of cake. But on that track, where the illusion of a smooth surface at a distance was replaced by a rippling, creaking, tramlining mass of wooden boards, and where the 47° banking had you almost more horizontal than vertical in the turns, it seemed like an impossibility. The riders in each pair would have to speed up and slow down respectively in the corners to make up for the different radii of their turns; the outside rider had to quite literally toe the line with as little deviation as possible, and the inside rider had the awful task of making it round the track one-handed at 20 miles per hour just to avoid falling over by default.

Pete and I paired up and gingerly headed off. A few laps in I could complete a circuit one-handed, staring fixedly at the boards in front of me and pedalling like it was the only thing keeping me from smashing painfully into the blue paint of the côte d’azur, because that’s exactly what it was. A few laps after that I held to the black line as Pete steadied himself in the sprinter’s lane with his hand on my back, and a few laps after that we swapped over and managed a second paired lap, this time with me wobbling along below and slightly behind him, managing to keep my hand planted on his back for one complete lap. We had all the coordination, grace and assurance of newborn calves on an ice rink, but we did it. We came down to the infield sweating with nerves, and, if I remember rightly, actually high-fived each other without even a hint of irony. Claire congratulated us, and we were happy.

I can now say without a shadow of a doubt that velodromes are awesome.

* The pair of fire doors next to the main entrance have a big sign on them: “Do Not Open Both Doors at Once!” I asked Claire the instructor about this and she told me that the ’drome has an air-supported roof — it’s basically a huge balloon which is kept rigid only by fans maintaining positive pressure inside it. Unfortunately, air-supported domes have certain problems, like collapsing when it snows.

† Fixed gear riders on the street get round this by doing a little hop: they lock up their legs as the back wheel comes off the ground and skid to a halt when it lands.

I’d done a bit of research into the various different dive centres in Vancouver, but to be honest the International Diving Centre’s tagline of “Diving is our middle name” had me pretty much from the word go. Their PADI Open Water course, more or less the default entry-level diver course the world over, ran over two weeks and a final weekend, with six classroom sessions and four i.e. swimming pool dives in the evenings, and then four open sea dives at the end.

The only obstacle in my way was the medical form. A few questions like “Do you or have you previously had any respiratory diseases?” and “Have you had any operations in the last two years?” (for which the answers were “yes” and “hell yes” respectively) threw a spanner in the works and I had to undergo a dive medical. I’d taken and narrowly failed such a test once before in Brisbane, childhood asthma causing me to score 73% in a single spirometry indicator where the reasonable minimum was 75%. This time round I drove over to a doctor in Burnaby, went through all of the same rigmarole and came through with almost all the same results — bigger lung capacity than average (windbag? Moi?) but lower throughput, for lack of a better word — but with a score of 78% in that one crucial indicator.

So, with a change in my readings well within a typical experimental margin of error, I was passed as fit to dive.

All told, the class contained about 15 people. We were a varied bunch: one Romanian chap proclaimed that he could already dive, but “without a qualification I can’t rent gear”; a couple of girls studying marine biology and volunteering at Vancouver Aquarium felt they had a better chance of getting a paying job with a dive course under their (weight) belts; a martial artist/bouncer/stag party planner, unsatisfied with his triple-barrelled job description, wanted to expand his horizons, and most of the rest of us were simply dive-curious.

Each evening we’d review a chapter of the Open Water textbook, do a few short quizzes to check we hadn’t entirely missed the points therein, and then head over to a nearby school’s swimming pool for the night’s dive. PADI gets a bit of a hard time* for “dumbing down” the science underpinning scuba diving, but given some of the questions that were raised in the classroom (“Whoa, whoa, whoa. The air gets compressed as you go deeper?”), maybe that’s not a fair criticism.

We had the options of renting a wetsuit for the pool dives, although the head instructor Landon assured us that the pool wasn’t all that cold. God, I wished I’d gone for a wetsuit. Not because the pool was cold — because it was cold after half an hour sitting largely immobile on the bottom — but because my awful, awful T-shirt tan would have been safely hidden under a layer of neoprene. Fully clothed, my limbs had acquired a modest tan and I no longer looked like a greasy-skinned, pallid anorexic; shirt off, my albino torso was revealed in all its terrible glory to the rest of the predictably athletic Vancouverite students. Red might be the first colour of light to be absorbed by the water but sadly nowhere is a swimming pool deep enough for it to matter.

Anyway, we went through a series of exercises during each pool dive, mostly to inculcate a degree of sang-froid when faced with emergencies. We had to deliberately discard and retrieve our regulators, breathe from our buddy’s alternate air source, get used to the feeling when the air runs out (simulated by the instructor turning the valve off), perform simulated emergency ascents, and so forth. We got used to the bulkiness and constriction imposed by our gear, learned how to manage our buoyancy and generally got comfortable underwater.

(To be continued!)

* IDC are essentially a franchise — one of a huge number — who have subscribed to PADI’s particular curriculum and qualification system. I wish I’d read more about PADI, because I now find out that they’ve been criticised for providing courses of dubious thoroughness and for emphasising profits rather than proficiency. I found out while chatting with the instructors that that some of the IDC staff had gone straight from student diver to instructor in one go, doing all of the requisite courses in (if I remember rightly) six months. Granted, they’d now all been teaching for far longer than that and were all able teachers, but that reflects better on them than it does on PADI. Couple that with the informercial flavour of the last chapter of the Open Water textbook, and one does start to wonder.

In other words, it was tremendii.

The next morning we were woken by the mechanical shriek of a circular saw and a general cacophony of other sounds of construction. We ate breakfast at a little café just up the road, the noise masked a little by intervening buildings, and soaked up the sunshine. I drank my coffee; Ash and I discussed my latest and greatest novel plot (a seafaring Mediterranean adventure starring an office worker disillusioned with his lot in the rat race—can you guess my inspiration?), and I mentally bookmarked the point at which the holiday turned from adventurous to relaxing.

We trotted around St. Julian’s for a while that morning but our hearts weren’t really in it; knowing that we could check into our final hotel in Golden Bay that afternoon we packed our gear and caught the first bus over to the other side of the island. Our bus was disappointingly modern* but the journey still took a while on the busy, winding roads.

The bus passed through the resort towns north-west of St. Julian’s before turning across the island to Golden Bay, and it was an educational journey. Malta is choked by construction. Every town was full of newly built or half-finished apartments blocks, but the further north we travelled the more we saw construction sites lying idle, some looking as if they hadn’t been touched for years. Once out of the towns, the landscape is (Ash tells me) just like Crete or Cyprus: dark green waxy bushes, reddish soil and omnipresent pale limestone rubble. Drystane walls are built from it; terraced fields on the hillsides are shored up with it; the innumerable bird-shooting hides** are cobbled together from it and the intermittent farmhouses are built from squared-off blocks of the stuff. Basically, any land not devoted to farming or roads is littered with the stuff.

The hotel loomed into view, overlooking a deep blue bay and sandy beach. Ash’s parents had again gifted us a week of their timeshare allocation and again we’d struck the jackpot: the Radisson SAS Golden Sands is not for the likes of us mere mortals. Our room was in fact a 2-bedroom apartment bigger than our flat. Holy shit, I thought. They’re going to chuck us out for making the place look untidy.

* * *

For the next week we just sat back and enjoyed the view, more or less: thinking back, I can’t remember a holiday where I’ve so wilfully ignored the local places of historical interest in favour of just hanging out in the sun, and it turns out I rather enjoy it. (As I type this, I’m sitting with a glass of beer on a beachfront patio watching the sun set over the aptly named Golden Bay, while Ash spends an hour or two in the hotel’s spa, and I can find very little wrong with this picture!) On the few nights where the weather deviated from calm and sunny, we sat on the balcony or watched through the patio doors as bolts of lightning cracked and hung in the sky for seemingly ages, and then enormous claps of thunder rolled over us a few seconds later. The storms never lasted out the night, and we had only a couple of cloudy but still warm days.

Apart from batting a tennis ball back and forth most evenings, our most strenuous activity so far has been some light scuba diving: one dive for both Ash and I in the bay below the hotel, and another couple for Ash a few days after that near the ferry port in the north of the island. With my elbow still playing up, our dive instructor Jason was leery of taking me on for a full four-day qualification course—that’ll have to wait, unfortunately—preferring to look the other way temporarily and combine a refresher dive for Ash with another “try dive” for me. Unlike the one in Croatia, he was happy for me to more or less take care of myself and I really enjoyed this one. Gone was the constant gnawing feeling that a submerged scuba diver is a busted regulator or panic attack away from being a corpse and instead I was able to fin gently along, looking around at the odd fish or sea urchin. To tell you the truth, I was more anxious about Ash, and I felt a little stab of fear each time I glanced around and couldn’t immediately see her, only to discover she was above or below me and happily doing her own thing.

For Ash’s wreck and reef dives off a couple of days later, Jason drove us in the diving school’s clanking Hilux up to the harbour at Cirkewwa, and while I waited for them to surface I pottered across to the shabby ferry terminal café and indulged my writer-in-exile fantasies, sitting outside with a cappuccino, a notebook and a faraway look in my eyes. Utter pomposity, of course, but enjoyable nonetheless.

* * *

We did finally manage to rouse ourselves for a bit of cursory sightseeing on a couple of days, first (abortively) to Malta’s smaller island neighbour Gozo and then to the capital Valetta.

Having taken a gratifyingly ancient bus to Cirkewwa, we arrived around lunchtime to be told that the buses on Gozo shut down for the early afternoon: tourists usually get there in the early morning and travel to the main city of Victoria/Rabat and then come back in the late afternoon, having spent the day exploring the place. Instead, we jumped on the Comino ferry, heading across to the even smaller island lying directly between Malta and Gozo, permanent home to exactly four people and temporary home to hundreds of tourists swimming in the island’s Blue Lagoon. Of course, having planned to do a bit of landlubber sightseeing on Gozo, we didn’t have any swimming gear with us, and nor did we have much clue about what Comino had to offer. In the event, Ash sunbathed down by the water while I hiked up to the Santa Marija watchtower and back, and we took the ferry back over to Malta around 3 pm. Not quite as edifying as I’d hoped, but a nice day out nonetheless.

The day before we left we headed into Valetta, the rickety bus taking about an hour from the hotel. We mooched around for a bit with the throngs of other tourists; we’d gone from a distinctly laid-back corner of the island to the busiest point on it, and it was a rude awakening. The town felt really familiar for some reason, with bits of Venice or Paris visible in the architecture and narrow streets, and maybe that familiarity was why neither of us felt particularly compelled to hang around for long. We had a quick look round the simple but engaging National Museum of Archaeology, ate a terrible lunch at an outdoor café spattered with bird shit and then hopped on the bus back.

And that was it; we caught (just) the plane home on Tuesday to land in the sub-zero Glasgow night. I feel like we didn’t see much of the day-to-day Malta at all, and I suppose that’s the price you pay for the days spent by the beach or the pool, but first impressions were still of a beautiful Mediterranean island with plenty going for it and a few niggles to lend it a bit of ‘character’. And of course, we’re now planning a trip to Cyprus next spring so I can finally get my PADI Open Water qualification somewhere other than an indoor pool!

* A fair number of Malta’s buses are tourist attractions in themselves, ancient Leylands or AECs hailing from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. By all accounts they’re usually punctual, frequent and reliable, but we had pretty dreadul luck with them. On our journey to catch the plane home, a few stops from the airport, the engined rattled to a halt while the driver mumbled into his mobile phone. He got off and stood listlessly around for a while, complaining that he felt unwell while looking to be in perfect health, until a car pulled up (driven by his wife by the looks of things) and he sped off. Another bus arrived, 10 minutes after the promised 5 minutes had elapsed and proceeded to crawl to the airport, the replacement driver bantering with some of his regular passengers up at the front and rarely venturing out of 2^nd gear. We sprinted into the airport, copped a lecture from the head check-in woman for being late and caught the plane in the nick of time.

** The Maltese love bird hunting. On any given day or night you hear the pock-pock of double-barrelled shotguns, and just about every scrap of land, farmed or otherwise, is covered in little stone hides. It’s an odd hobby—the EU certainly thinks so—and it’s a little disconcerting to listen to the entire population out there in the evenings trying to blow the few remaining winged creatures out of the sky.

Ash, an out of practice rescue diver, had booked a refresher dive for the next morning, and after some discussion with (i.e. good-natured derisive snorting from) the attendant diving instructors, I was throwing caution and medical advice to wind and doing a beginner’s “discovery” dive after lunch. I hung around while Ash got kitted out, helped them lumber down into the shallows and watched with increasing surprise as they took a few experimental breaths and sank beneath the waves. It’s not that you don’t know that this is what happens, but to see your girlfriend disappear with the merest traces of bubbles left behind is rather unnerving. I half expected them all to come up for a big breath any second; they didn’t, so I took a seat among the barbequing sunbathers to wait for them.

After about forty minutes they surfaced again and I could tell Ash wasn’t all that impressed. Apparently, Marco the guide was disinterested and workmanlike, the house “reef” was mostly a pile of rocks and the fauna (listlessly prodded by Marco, which is apparently considered extremely bad form by PADI) was restricted to some hermit crabs and the odd starfish.

I had a different guide: a friendly Dutch guy called Patrick who was both enthusiastic and serious about diving. We did a half hour of theory, most of which seemed sensible to a lapsed physicist like your correspondent (main take-home tip: fail to breathe out as you ascend and your lungs will explode), along with a few signs meaning “OK”, “My ears hurt” and “It’s getting a bit tricky” among others. The gist of the dive itself was that he’d hold onto my left arm the whole time and also manage my buoyancy by inflating or deflating my BCD for me. All I had to do was to swim in the directions he indicated and try not to freak out.

I got into my wetsuit, complete with hilariously ripped ass seam, and waddled down the the stony beach. It’s not obvious when watching experienced divers, but in the shallows you’re about as mobile as a newborn baby. I floundered around like a beached whale trying to put my fins on, eventually coming to a vaguely composed halt by kneeling on a rock with Ash’s help while I waited for Patrick to get ready. “Put on your mask,” he said, “try out the regulator by sticking your face in the water.”

Here goes then, I thought. I put the regulator in my mouth and took a couple of exploratory breaths; it seemed fairly natural above water, although you do need to breathe in fairly emphatically to start the air flowing each time. I stuck my head in the water and lasted for about three breaths, reflexively jerking my head back out again exactly when a single lungful of air would have run out.

“OK?” asked Patrick.

“Yup!! It’s weird! It’s very weird,” I prattled. I didn’t know how to phrase “Good God, what the hell have I agreed to here?” such that it didn’t sound bad, so beyond that I kept my trap shut.

“You’ll be okay. Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to swim out to that pontoon” – he pointed to the edge of the floating pier, maybe ten metres away – “face down, with our jackets filled with air so we’re buoyant, then we’ll stop and dive to a sandy bowl about six metres down.”

I listened, mechanically put the regulator back in my mouth and swam with him over to the pier. With the air tanks on our backs we were mostly submerged and there was no way to avoid breathing entirely through the regulator. Through my mask I watched the sea bed slide past and drop away from us and the whole time (although it was only about thirty seconds) tried to ignore the part of my brain emitting a continuous silent scream. We got to the end of the pier and righted ourselves so we were bobbing vertically on the surface, the water rolling around at mask level. I snatched a couple of breaths of fresh air, not quite believing what we’d just done.

“OK?” the instructor signed.

“OK!!” I twitched back.

He pointed down with his thumb, indicating that we were about to dive, then deflated my BCD and his BCD in turn. We dropped slowly downwards and I concentrated very, very hard on swallowing to equalise the pressure in my ears while breathing as regularly as I could. The mental effort almost exactly balanced the urge to freak out, so that for that first descent I was teetering on the edge of a sort of existential rather than physical panic.

The number of different sensations is overwhelming: the effort needed to breathe through the regulator initially feels like shortness of breath, while the mouthpiece itself is pulled slightly to one side by the hose and threatens to come out if you relax your jaw for a second. The exhaled bubbles rush past your ears with a deafening roar, your inner ear snaps, crackles and pops as the pressure changes and the water swilling around the bottom of your mask makes it feel like something critical is leaking. Oh, and being completely submerged – not only that, but six metres below the surface – leads to utterly perfect cognitive dissonance. “Why am I not drowning?” your brain quite reasonably asks. “You’ve got me,” you reply. And there’s another curiosity: you can’t talk to your diving buddy, so all of your conversations are with yourself: the internal monologue becomes a dialogue.

“Holy crap, this is weird.”

“I know! You don’t have to tell me twice.”

We settled on the bottom in the patch of sand. Patrick inflated my BCD until I was more or less neutrally buoyant and motioned for me to swing up so I was horizontal, facing the sea floor; he did the same and we slowly kicked off.

I’d managed to wall off my incredulity by now and followed his lead as we swam forwards and down, popping my ears all the while. We pointed (with slightly disproportionate enthusiasm) at the fish and crustaceans we saw along the way.

“There! Could that be a herring?”

“My word! I do believe it is a veritable shoal of them.”

Stopping on the bottom again a few minutes later, he pointed at his depth gauge: 14.6m! As I looked up at the cloud of bubbles floating up to the barely visible surface, I had the thought that “I could just take the regulator out at any time,” in exactly the same way that when peering over the edge of, say, the Grand Canyon you might be inclined to think “it would be so easy to jump.” The fact the I didn’t immediately spit out the mouthpiece reassured me greatly.

Patrick gave me the thumbs up and we followed our bubbles to the surface, my ears crackling as they equalised themselves. We popped up on the other side of the floating pier, I ripped off my mask and, oddly worried that I might suddenly be unable to breathe, took out the regulator. “Well done!” he said, “that was about seventeen minutes, you’ve used about a third more oxygen than me and we got to 14.6 metres. How do you feel?”

“Intrigued,” was the best way I could put it. I don’t know if I could call it fun – I was too busy suppressing the urge to wig out most of the time – but it was such a novel experience that we’re already talking about a diving trip next year!

Update: Hooray! We remembered my instructor’s name, and it is Patrick.

In a spectacularly cruel twist of fate, then, my diving course has been both metaphorically and literally blown out of the water. Chris dropped me off in nearby Stafford Heights today for my dive medical, where a nurse used a spirometer to measure my lung function, and then passed me onto a doctor for more traditional reflex, visual acuity and physical checks. Looking at the printout from the spirometer, he re-tested me with it and printed out the second, slightly better test.

Apparently my lung capacity is 115% of the expected size for my height and weight, but the FEF_25-75% (trips off the tongue, don’t it?), measuring sustained flow of air over the middle few seconds of each exhalation, is only 73% of the predicted value. He apologetically told me that it should be at least 75% to be completely safe, and he had to put me down as temporarily unfit to dive.

As I was leaving, he suggested that I could organise some further tests to bear out whether or not I’m beyond hope. Unfortunately these particular tests are A) expensive and B) have a lead time slightly longer than the 16 hours left before the course is due to start. Oh well: bagpiping as a kid has clearly given me disproportionately big lungs, and on/off asthma around the same time has partially screwed them. Bugger.

Had it not been an unseemly hour to do so, I’d've gone straight to the pub to drown (oh, the irony) my sorrows.