LET'S BE HONEST, WE'VE ALL BEEN THERE. It's miserable weather and the sleet is coming off the water at a gravity-defying angle. Some wannabe club Diving Officer is barking orders at bewildered novices about drills to be done and boxes that need ticking off because "I'm not doing this for my own benefit, you know". Right, like you intend getting wet today.
     We saw a prat from Newcastle shouting at four girls carrying a 60hp Mariner up a beach in Oban. One of them was crying, and I just thought: "I hate divers."
     Two of us got up to help while Diver Dick (written on his shirt, how apt) continued his rant. We put the engine on a grassy patch (as instructed) and he snorted and walked off, muttering about bloody novices.
     It was even stranger when, on hearing a distress call later that day, we went out to help. We found Diver Dick in the bottom of his own club boat, which had run out of fuel, had no flares or working radio and had two divers drifting off towards the Corryvreckan (one of the largest whirlpools in the world).
     He was starting to show symptoms of DCS, having done three repetitive dives that day. We got his boat working with some string and picked up his divers while he was taken for a stay at the Dunstaffnage pot.
     I have dived for 12 years in a number of clubs and organisations, from the USA and Australia to the UK. I have seen some bizarre stuff and met some astonishing people. I have seen folk get into life-threatening situations in less than six inches of water and blame someone else.
     I have seen a friend fall off an unstable boat while quadded for an 80m mix dive, with no gas turned on or buoyancy available, and come back from a fairly scary impromptu dip to 30m (having become double-jointed to reach a valve, then developed a revolutionary finning technique to return to the surface quickly) and ask someone to turn the rest of his gas on, please!
     Diving is a passion. There is nothing better than dropping in with 80m of clear blue water between you and a virgin wreck. But what makes it so memorable is what happens afterwards: the immediate piss-taking on surfacing by my peers about how fat I look with a rebreather on (I promise, I'm 14.5 stone but eat like a sparrow!), how my fin-kicking is crap, and why my buddy never sees me except when I leave the shot and (sometimes) come back to it later. I know I deserve it.
     Our open-ended group doesn't have a name and we don't shout about the diving we do, though we have found fantastic wrecks around the UK that some hardboat-owners now use regularly and insist they did the groundwork for.
     We also dabbled with salvage last year and raised some copper off the Cornish coast. We push ourselves quite hard and are committed to a task once it's on.
     We have great co-ordinators and planners, others with an uncanny ability to pick up fantastic research, and others who bring tales of torment from their private lives to keep us all amused when we get blown out, and spend the day formulating our own Equivalent Drinking Depth runtime schedules in the pub!
     We're not a club, though most of us belong to one or two. We don't pay subs or have a committee; we're friends and will always be so.
     We plan our diving to the finest detail without quite realising it. Things constantly go wrong; don't let anyone tell you they don't, because they're lying. With extended-range mix diving, little problems become very big, very quickly and it's simply experience and teamwork that prevent disasters. We take the piss out of each other relentlessly, but who cares? It's all part of growing up.
     Our dark humour extends to: "No chance - I've saved your life way more times than you've saved mine!" and developing new medical techniques for post lemonade and a nightclub DCS diagnosis, involving the inability to get to grips with the button mushrooms on your plate at breakfast, aka the Buhlmann Mushroom Test!
     We never pay each other compliments, and only remember the things that embarrass our mates when in the pub. But, though we would never admit it, we always look after each other and would do anything for each other.
     So if you're sick of clubs in which politics is the over-riding issue, there are plenty of avenues to explore. Diving's about having fun, real fun, while doing something you're passionate about.
     Don't be afraid of telling your tales of woe - we all cock things up frequently. Learn from mistakes, and don't think that people who use trimix and rebreathers are all robotic freaks, because we're just having fun, or trying to.
     My late father, a passionate angler, would say to me: "He who goes fishing to catch fish isn't a fisherman." The same is true of diving - you can have as much fun out of the water as under it.
     And if Diver Dick is giving you a hard time, get someone big and scary to flush his head down the toilet, and tell him to get a life or stop diving. He's giving some of us a bad name!