Unless you've been hibernating over the past month (or you're fortunate enough to reside outside of the UK), you'll have noticed that we've been experiencing a little snow and ice around our island in the Atlantic.
Most of us (me included) decided that this would be a good oppourtunity to stock up the kitchen shelves with hot soup and bread rolls, wrap ourselves in a duvet for a few more minutes each morning, and generally try to get through the snow storms as best we could.
The team at Above and Below Dive Centre, Pontefract decided differently however. Martin and Sharon Ainsworth saw this as an oppourtunity to provide training to their customers that wasn't usually available in the UK, and often cost quite considerable amounts of money to complete elsewhere...PADI Ice Diver.
I'll not try to explain the psychology behind their decision to jump into freezing water in January (I'd be there myself if I didn't have a dislocated shoulder...honest!). Therefore I'll let Sharon Ainsworth explain in her own words how they went about this endeavour:
"As you know, Martin, not backwards in coming forwards, decided to take advantage of the sub zero temperatures, (and the fact that Blue Lagoon has completely iced over) and promote the ice diver speciality – a first for us here in the UK!!!! - here’s how it went:
We started at 8am, preparing the site prior to divers arriving – what a surprise this was – you can see by the photo, the chunk of ice we took out was several inches thick, remarkable considering the lake is over 16 acres, and all frozen! It was so heavy that one of our team had to get in and smash it up into smaller pieces!!
After refreshing everyone on knot tying, we began to assign roles as divers, rope tenders and safety divers working as a team. This was a challenge in itself, as EVERYONE wanted to be first in! Anyway, after the biggest, most senior, superior, etc, etc won, they got kitted up, roped up and descended through the hole into the crystal clear water. AWESOME was the response from the first diver on surfacing!
We had so many divers wanting to go in, by mid afternoon, we had cut 3 separate entry/exit holes through the ice, with 3 separate dive teams around the lake.
Anyhow, 6 ice diving instructors and 15 new ice divers later, and lots of excited and smiley faces – the day was a ‘titanic’ success, (excuse the pun), so much so, we can’t wait to do it again later this week (weather permitting)
The air temperature was 2 degs C, water temp 0 degs C."
I think you'll agree that this looks like great fun, and is a great example of PADI Members taking advantage of the change in weather to get divers learning some new skills, completing further training and having a great time whilst doing it.
If any other PADI Members have been doing anything interesting over the previous months (BCD Sledging?!!!) please send your article and photographs through to me at richard.howes@padi.co.uk and I'll get the posted on this blog.
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