Stoney Cove: Trials & Triumphs

By Jakub Syngowski (newly qualified Ocean Diver)

In the last weekend of June, a group of Clidive instructors and trainees headed to Stoney Cove to complete the open water part of their qualifications. Despite a number of adversities, thanks to great organisation and teamwork, we managed to complete the required training and get a crop of new Ocean and Sports Divers.

Getting there

Most of us travelled on Friday evening. Despite an active red alert due to the heatwave, all of us got to the hotel in time to enjoy a drink before bedtime.

We were staying in the Leonardo Hotel near Hinckley. Knowing Clidive’s cost-conscious approach (and due to our lack of baseline), my room-buddy Tom and I expected nothing more than a tent under a bridge somewhere. We were quite surprised when we got to our room, as the hotel was fancy. We each had a bed wide enough to use in either direction, and there was a sauna in the hotel!

In the morning, together with three other trainees, we drove to Stoney in Yannick’s small but mighty car.

The place

Stoney is an efficient, streamlined diving place. Near the gate, people were checking tickets and separating divers from ‘normal people’ (which, I learned, is a technical term locals use to denote swimmers). 

The lake is an old quarry filled with water and scattered with underwater highlights like sculptures, submarines and a plane. It has a bar with very helpful staff, a high-throughput gas-filling station and a dive shop where we were planning to rent suits, weights and cylinders.

Day one: Cylinder-gate

Ah yes, cylinders… It turned out that, due to another big group renting cylinders that day, Stoney didn’t have enough for us. Luckily, thanks to the magician skills of Michal ‘fixer’ Simpson, we managed to conjure up enough from other dive groups to continue, with an elaborate ‘cylinder Jenga’ scheme involving quickly swapping cylinders between divers.

As an Ocean Diver trainee, I did two dives on the first day. Both of them were very memorable. The first one was my first-ever proper open-water dive: we swam around a submarine and were getting used to the ‘oh this is real now’ feeling. The second was memorable because the way I did the Alternative Source ascent left something to be desired, as Nick, our instructor, carefully and kindly explained to us later in the debrief. We decided to attempt the same exercise the next day.

When getting in and out of the water, we were accompanied by a family of ducklings; even though their swimming skills were admirable, I think we ended up better divers.

After the dives, Snack Manager Jiexin led us to the bar to fill ~20L-worth of plastic water bottles to keep ourselves hydrated on day two while living the ecologically friendly ideals of Clidive.

Back at the hotel, the Ocean Divers did a dive-planning exercise where Marco and I were able to show off our fast multiplication skills in support of estimating maximum dive time at a given depth. After that, we marked the exercises we had completed on our skills sheets, which were printed on waterproof paper (however, with non-waterproof ink).

After the obligatory part of the training, the hotel offered us two alternative entertainment sources: watching the England-Panama football match or attending a 50th birthday party in one of the conference rooms. The choice of their activity will stay a secret of the Clidivers involved.

Day two: Gate-gate

To leave the hotel gate with a car, one needed to enter the code available at reception. The code changed daily. Even though we did our due diligence in obtaining the code, we weren’t able to leave, as the code didn’t work. Only thanks to Nick’s codebreaking skills did we manage to get out by entering yesterday’s code, to the confusion of other hotel guests and staff.

Stoney was busier on Sunday but luckily we had managed to reserve the cylinders the previous day and were able to quickly get ready for the day.

I did my first dive just with Nick. This was the absolute best dive of my life – although  a careful reader will realise this isn’t a high bar to clear yet. We did a couple of exercises like the crowd-favourite mask removal, but most importantly we did a longer swim around Stoney and explored its underwater attractions. We circumnavigated the Nessie figure, we spun the propeller of a fake (?) rocket, explored the plane cockpit, and visited an underwater ‘pub’. My buoyancy was much better than on the previous day and we were able to focus on the things around us instead of constantly going up and down.

After the dive we treated ourselves to a choice of non-alcoholic drinks in the bar and returned to the water for the afternoon dive. Debbie kindly agreed to act as a casualty for my AS and CBL exercises and she made a very easy-to-rescue one, although apparently, complaining about the rescue style while being unconscious is a bit of a faux pas.

After the last dive, we went for the debrief in the pub. Possibly in part thanks to the alcohol-fuelled merriment, Nick declared that, despite hiccups the previous day, he was confident signing off my Ocean Diver qualification. Woohoo!

We ended the day in the pub in a growing circle of Clidivers finishing their debriefs and joining our casual chat.

With great memories we came back to London, looking forward to using our qualifications on future dive trips. A special thanks goes to Marta and Debbie, who organised the chaos out of the trip, and everyone else – Nick, Elaine, JD, Jaka – who made it a reality for us trainees!