The dive boat hurtled at the swell, outboard motors bellowing, the white-knuckled skipper see-sawing the throttle, the rest of us staring transfixed at the crackling green breakers on the bow.
     Our feet were jammed into strops, our hands wrapped around canvas handles, our eyes were bulging and our nostrils flaring in the classic mammalian response to imminent death. The bow rose into the wave, rising steeper until all I could see ahead was blue sky and (this might have been my imagination) several angels beckoning me into a cloud.
     The skipper's brown feet lifted slightly from the deck, his expression of grim determination replaced by one of resigned misery, before miraculously gravity took charge and the bow slapped into the back of the wave, accompanied by eight whooshing noises as the occupants explosively exhaled.
     The next sound was surprising. It came from me, without the slightest warning and without me having the remotest ability to control it. It was a steady stream of expressions drawing heavily on contemporary Anglo-Saxon terms, punctuated by the odd religious saying, dotted with some new words I had picked up from a documentary on LA gang wars.
     This cocktail of cultural unpleasantness was directed at the skipper, though occasionally I used it as an area weapon by directing it at the rest of the divers in a random sweeping verbal barrage.
     Diving is a stressful pastime. Climbing the face of a gigantic breaker in a vessel driven by a gibbering, Ray-Ban-sporting, acne-speckled youth off South Africa is an extreme example, but pulse rates tend to creep up during the whole, complicated process of turning back the evolutionary clock to get us under the water.
     But we can take toothy predators, and camouflaged lumpen things that have been developing their looking-exactly-like-a rock-so-I-can-sting-some-diver-with-my-ludicrously-potent-poisonous spines skills. We can take downcurrents and bluewater syndrome, and the Òwhoops-I-seem-to-be-at-60m-and-I-only-learned-to-dive-yesterdayÓ tropical stuff. Why? Because nowhere on Earth will ever be more stressful for diving than Britain.
     Here's why. You check the weather forecast, and unless this is happening just before one baking July weekend in 1976 that I seem to remember, it's marginal.
     But we're all here now, and Dave has just bought a new suit, and I haven't dived for nine months and I promised myself this weekend, sod it, we're going.
     We arrive on site, find somewhere to park (more stress). Unload the car and start to kit up. Two things of note here. The first is that divers are still regarded as novelties in many places. A passing child will shriek: ÒLook - divers!Ó as we stagger amusingly around the car park, clawing ineffectually at our neck seals. Soon a small crowd of ambling folk gathers, and we're set for the next stage.
     If a genius sat down for a long time and tried to design a big, awkward, heavy-hosey thing, he would come up with a set of dive kit. As the temperature in our suits reaches 200¡C, we set our shoulders and approach our kit as it hisses malevolently at us from a corner of the car park.
     The resulting struggle involving two grown men and a robo-bagpipe is always a treat, particularly the bit where one of them gets his arm stuck as he's putting it on, then finally gets it all on, only to find that a crucial hose has gone behind his neck and under the wrong armpit, so that he has to do it all again.
     The final touch is the weightbelt - generally impressively immense, because of the genuine moosehair undersuit required to keep warm in British waters.
     Clip on a few fripperies, because no-one ventures under the soup bathing our coasts without a torch like a WW2 searchlight and navigation aids that would shame a Stealth bomber, and at last we can clank to the water's edge.
     During the ensuing checks, Dave realises that he has forgotten his mask. Not a massive problem, as it's in the car, but he will need to open it - probably with the keys in his undersuit pocket.
     For those who missed the kitting-up sitcom, they get to see it all again.
     Ah, bliss, to sink beneath azure waters, to drift as one with sun-kissed shoals. The dive is underway. Problem is, a trickle is getting into Dave's new suit. When he moves his head, trickle becomes stream, and soon his alarmed expression becomes slightly dulled by extreme cold.
     What's more, it seems to be pooling in the groin area, to physiological howls of protest from his outraged gonads. For the last half of the dive, Dave exhibits the body language of a kicked dog. We get lost, and have to surface to see where we are, which is miles from the exit.
     Dave wants to get out, so we do, and trudge along the sea-front, Dave's ankles swishing amusingly at every step.
     There's just time to change in the now Siberian wind whipping gleefully around the confines of the car park, and then it's off to buy an over-priced bacon sarnie from the surly greaseball of a vendor. All that's left is the two-hour drive home.