FANTASY DIVING LEAGUE   LOUISE TREWAVAS

Why is it that the first item of kit many new divers buy is a knife? Not a small knife, but a huge, shiny blade that almost eclipses their calf. After about six dives, most will figure out that they're swim-ming lopsided because of the weight of stainless steel strapped to one leg. There is only one plausible explanation. Buying a knife helps to fulfil a fantasy about diving: it's rough, tough, and adventurous; enemy spies and hungry sharks are likely to attack at any moment. Most divers will harbour a sneaking suspicion that reality doesn't quite match this fantasy. The rest usually pass swiftly through to become technical divers. I know a bit about it because I own a dive knife that looks as if it was designed by a team of ninjas with a vampire-slaying fetish. It has never been diving, but it can slice a lemon into eight pieces in under a second. So that'll be me, the cocktail queen of Portland Harbour. I'm not alone. Diving is chockful of people living in a fantasy world. The BSAC still thinks it's the biggest dive club in the world; that spot was claimed several years ago by the Pink Scuba League - American women diving tropical destinations in fluorescent lycra. Innes McCartney believes that he is a re-incarnated submarine and is searching for his lost family. Mares is under the impression that if it plumbs your regulator into your BC pocket and gives it a fancy name you'll pay twice as much for it. The Receiver of Wrecks never doubts that you will report that porthole stashed in the garden shed. Dive magazine labours under the illusion that I can be arsed to open the plastic wrapper on the copy it sends me every month. Always one to exploit a trend, PADI has excelled itself with a new Cosmonaut Diver speciality. Those formative years spent screeching "Ground Control to Major Tom!" into half an empty washing-up liquid bottle with a piece of string attached need not go to waste. You can now parade about in full spaceman outfit and live out your dream inside a water-filled tank. You might never leave the Earth's atmosphere, but if you're prepared to pay thousands to dress up and pretend, then, baby - you're already on another planet! I was fascinated to see what the PADI marketing machine could come up with to top that. Then an e-mail arrived with the next great leap forward: PADI is about to launch a technical diving programme. I can see it now: Open Water Technical Diver with Advanced Piston Clip operation speciality. You might be limited to a depth of 12m, but you get to attach every gadget known to the diving industry onto your BC. You also get a special black qualification card. For added mystique, the words are also in black. Tom Cruise, eat your heart out! Just one small, tiny, insignificant problem. Nothing, I'm sure, that will dampen the enthusiasm of the diving public or trouble the mental cohesion of the PADI hierarchy. What kind of technical diving can you do with an organisation that believes decompression stops are the work of the devil? The first time I watched a PADI diver with one of those plastic wheel thingies, I assumed he was following a rather complicated knitting pattern. Two hours of twiddling and several painkillers later, I still couldn't get it to tell me what stops I should be doing. Eventually the penny dropped - decompression is forbidden! So being a PADI technical diver is going to be the most fabulous fantasy trip imaginable. I suggest visiting your nearest rufty-tufty technical dive shop, asking for a trimix fill and showing them your shiny black card. Better still, video the encounter. Then we can all share the experience of a diver falling back to earth with a loud bump. Appeared in DIVER - October 2000