Dive Clubs

Chaos-Engine

Excellent!!
Finally a SCUBA forum

ok.. Who do u dive with? Where and what club(if any)?
BSAC, CFT or PADi...

I'm a BSAC and CFT diver
in DUSAC(Trinity SAC) at the moment.

Bloody excellent diving in college
so cheap

vibe666

Mine's kinda a long way away at the minute.

Used to live in Tenerife, and went to a very good PADI/BSAC dive centre there. Los Gigantes Dive Centre

Did Rescue Diver and then did a 6 week internship while I was doing my Divemaster exams, but the guy I was doing it with dropped out and I ended up going out every night and getting p*ssed, which isn't really the best thing to do when you're in the water at 9am. Only exams I didn't pass were Physics and Physiology, and due to all the 'good times' I didn't get round to taking them again.

Really wish I had, given the amount of work I'd put in, but living in Tenerife has a funny effect on you, and nobody ever really gets anything done.

Anyway, I got 90+ dives under my belt from the time I started to the time I quit, and I've been on 10-15 dives since, all in warm water (legs end of a 5mm wettie, year round).

Good diving, but not a lot of vegetation, just lots of sea urchins. Plenty of fish though. Jacks, grunts, bream, lots of rays (in certain areas (with a ray feeding site, visited 2 x per week) and octopus too.

Great night diving, with bioluminecent plankton (or something like it) in the water which glows yellow when the water around it is disturbed. Squid and octopus are more active at night too. Not a regular occurance at the centre, but I got to go on 2 night dives while I was there, so that was good.

Mick L

I qualified as PADI but have recently started an IANTD course.
I'm not in any club but do a lot of my diving with Scuba Dive West in Galway.

Unfortunately I only got involved in diving after I left college so i couldn't take advantage of the club there (especially the price!!!)

Chaos-Engine

Originally posted by Mick L
I qualified as PADI but have recently started an IANTD course.
I'm not in any club but do a lot of my diving with Scuba Dive West in Galway.

Unfortunately I only got involved in diving after I left college so i couldn't take advantage of the club there (especially the price!!!)

Most colleges allow post-grads to join the SCUBA clubs.
Case in point: TCD. Most the members of DUSAC have left the college already

Peace

Seriously mick, if you get into Trinty dive club then i'm gonna kick you ass big style. Forget about it. not gonna happen. Not on my watch.

Mick L

Hmmm It's tempting just to see the look on your face Peace.

Nah college would have been great for the training but now that we're qualified it works out better at the moment not to be diving with any club. We have a good set up at the moment. We dive where we want, when we want . There are no restrictions due to other divers who may not want to do the same diving we do.

We came across a situation like that on a liveaboard in the Red Sea. Luckily there were instructors on board so we could split the group up into two, with our group getting to do the better (IMHO) diving.

daveg

Myself & a mate (currently doing his divemaster in Mexico as described in my earlier post - the bástard) learned to dive in scubadive west about 7 years ago. We started a club in Nortel (Galway) to take advantage of the sports & social I did my open water & advanced with them. Did a good few dives in Killary (including the conger run which is renowned for conger eels - we saw none :rolleyes: ). Killary is great for kelp but throughout our dives we saw feck all fish - apart from the deep dives and night dives.

We also did some diving in the Maherees in Co Kerry and also attempted to dive off the Kowloon bridge . We had to cancel and just did some local dives as the weather was rough.

I finally experienced some proper diving when we went on holiday to Florida. I dived off Looe key in the Florida keys. This really opened my eyes to what diving could be like. I was used to cold/dry suit diving in Ireland and here I was diving in water temp of 30 degrees. It was like a warm bath. One of the guides fed a moray eel and other highlights were 6ft nurse sharks.

I eventually managed to go back and dive in Jan of this year. Over the three dives I saw 3 reef tip sharks and again a few nurse sharks but the highlight were 2 huge eagle rays . My guide told me to sit on the bottom (not easy !!) and the eagle rays swam in a cicle around us. Magical.

Mick L

It's tough to get back into Irish diving after being away on holiday. I remember our first dive back in Ireland after the Red Sea. It was also in Killary, but it was before the dry suit speciality so we were in wet suits.

Going from warm clear waters on the Thistlegorm to not quite so clear freezing water on the Julia T would almost make you wonder you'd bother. But after another few dives you get right back into it.

It's certainly helpful to learn to dive here and go abroad than the other way around. We went diving with friends of ours one weekend. They learned to dive in Australia and were keen to keep it up after returning home but they didn't like it at all once they were in the water here.

daveg

It's like a different adventure diving in Ireland. You don't see as much fish/plants ect but it's like a big adventure. Irish diving is a lot more hardy.

Peace

It's like a different adventure diving in Ireland. You don't see as much fish/plants ect but it's like a big adventure. Irish diving is a lot more hardy.

I'll second that....hardy. But it depends on where you dive regarding the fish + crabs + lobsters> You can get some really nice dives.