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MY DIVE
WAS BETTER
THAN YOURS
YASEMIN IS ABOUT TO HURL HERSELF 105M into the depths of the Red Sea and swim back up - on one breath. She is, of course, nuts, but she has trained for months, and it will be a new free-diving record.
Please don't ask me which particular record, because free-divers seem to invent new, tortuous variations daily. I'm just waiting for the Longest Breath-Hold Immersed In Cold Custard to be announced.
I daren't say this aloud, as I'm surrounded by free-diving groupies who regard the art of competitive suffocation with a reverence that makes Islamic Jihad look pretty slack. "Thank goodness scuba divers don't have all this competitive nonsense," I think to myself smugly.
So that'll be me, from smug to mug in less than three seconds.
Divers might not stage competitive events, but we have lots of imaginative ways to play our games of one-upmanship. Visit any dive site and you'll find some bizarre behaviours that make sense only when you unravel the rivalries that lurk beneath.
If you're out diving where the seabed is at 24m, there will always be someone who gets back on the boat claiming to have done 26m. Were they diving the same site? Did they spend their dive digging a hole into which to stick their wrist?
Then there's the diver with all the latest gadgets. If you dive with him (sorry, but it's invariably a bloke) at least three will malfunction and either beep continuously, fall apart at a critical moment, or get hopelessly entangled. Luckily, these toys take lots of looking after, which can prevent the owner boring you senseless about them in the pub.
You'll often find a diver, vastly more qualified than you, who will insist on giving you lots of advice on how to improve your diving: "Oh no, you don't want to rig your octopus like that!" Before you know it, they've created total chaos with your kit.
Some divers get back on the boat and announce loudly how much air they have left: "95 bar! I'll get another dive on that, maybe two." Lovely - staying as shallow as possible, skip-breathing and trying not to fin.
I once caught a bloke sitting at the bottom of a shotline, just watching his dive-timer tick over. Not my idea of an interesting dive, but it meant that he was definitely down there longer than anyone else. Which seemed to make him happy.
Scuba is supposedly a non-competitive sport, but a small corner of our brain persists in finding ways for us to feel quietly superior to other divers. Unlike those upfront free-divers, we're fairly secretive about our competitions and - conveniently enough - we judge our own achievements. Well, most of the time.
I recently presented an astonishingly large number of prizes at a dive club dinner: Best Trainee Diver; Best Find, for a complete toolbox recovered from the seabed; Wooden Spoon for the biggest balls-up; a prize for the diver who could swim furthest under water on one breath...
Most memorable for me was the trophy for the bloke who caught the biggest crabs. I wasn't sure whether to shake his hand or escape to the toilet and scrub myself down with disinfectant.
Technical diving is the natural playground for the mega-competitive. I'd love to say I rise above it, but I suspect my lack of competitive spirit is because my only winning category would be "person who breaks the most fingernails while kitting up".
That, and Queen Bitch. I reduced a man to furious incoherence by finding a battered old dive glove on a wreck he was claiming to be the first to have dived. The self-delusion of the self-important is boundless: despite video evidence to the contrary, he maintains his claim!
Yasemin, I take it back. By comparison, you are positively sane.
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