CLUB MED HAS A SUCCESSFUL FORMULA, and it likes to adhere to it. Its resorts are all-inclusive, so by and large you pay upfront and forget about it - unless, that is, you participate in some activity which incurs extra costs (like your bar bill or scuba-diving). The whole thing revolves around sports appropriate to the location.
     There are 120 Club Med villages in 40 countries, and some 85 are open at any one time, according to season. There are 56 golf villages alone, but 60 different sports are available across the world, from boxing and body-pumping to sailing with catamarans.
     Free-diving is taught all year round at Club Med in Martinique and in summer in Sardinia. Every year the management likes to offer new sports, and many of these are beach or ocean-based.
     The Club Med in the Caribbean island of St Lucia provides all manner of water-related sports, including scuba-diving. It's an upmarket holiday camp. Many people choose a different Club Med each time, but they feel comfortable with the formula, which is strong enough to transcend the culture of its location.
     It's also very French, more Ooh La La than Hi De Hi. Although all the staff are multi- or bilingual, the French language dominates the resort, and so does the French character.
     While I was there I found that the few members of staff who spoke only English (they were Americans) didn't know what was going on half the time!

More Americans than people of any other nationality visit St Lucia, yet in terms of "person-nights" it's the British who dominate the island's tourist trade. That business has become increasingly important to St Lucia's economy, especially with the recent demise in Caribbean banana sales to Europe.
     But St Lucia has many areas with French names, and the locals speak both English and Creole. Stay in the Club Med village, a Gallic enclave if ever there was one, and you could be forgiven for thinking this island was French.
     There are no "guests and staff" but "Gentil Membres" and "Gentil Organisateurs" (GMs and GOs).
     The entertainment never stops. In the evening the GOs, or "staff", put on shows. There is a lot of audience participation, and the French GMs, or "punters", like to get involved.
     (If you can't follow this GM and GO business, don't worry. I was there for two days before I worked out that I was a GM!)
     The GOs, who tend to be fit young people of both sexes, are encouraged to mingle with the GMs. At mealtimes it's frowned on for more than two GOs to sit together. They have to spread their favours. Most guests tend to be married couples with children or older people, but a casual glance around the large dining areas gives the impression of a high youth quotient. It's a clever ruse.
     If you are of a sociable disposition, it's an opportunity to sit and spend time with a lot of different people, and who doesn't want to spend time with the young and beautiful?

The atmosphere is informal. One night I had a jolly chat with a very interesting local man called Kenny. He turned out to be the Prime Minister of St Lucia! It was like meeting Tony at Butlins. What a relaxed and informal people the real folk of St Lucia are!
     In Club Med St Lucia, daytime activities include tennis, go-kart racing, tours with the all-terrain vehicles sometimes known as quad-bikes, windsurfing, scuba and sun-bathing. Now the management has added some new extreme sports to that menu.
     I went with some 50 European press people to see what was on offer. Some of the Club Med Pro Team were there demonstrating their crafts.
     Taig Khris, world champion in-line skater, had looked in. Emmanuel Bertin demonstrated the new and dramatic sport of kite-surfing. Champion pro wakeboarder Emily Copeland thrilled us with a variety of stunts, as did Robert Teriitehu on a funboard.
     Britain's own windsurf champion, Tristan Boxford, showed us how to do it standing up, and a name more familiar on these pages, former depth-record holder Umberto Pelizzari, demonstrated breath-holding and free-diving.
     These extreme sportspeople appear only from time to time at Club Med resorts. They work as consultants.
     On day one, Pelizzari demonstrated free-diving and I was allowed to do a bluewater dive on my own to photograph him. The Club Med Chief Diver came with me but gave me plenty of space to get on with my job. We were the only onlookers to get a proper view of what Umberto was doing.
     That was the good bit. Later during my stay, the Club Med rules for scuba-diving kicked in and I was subjected to a very different discipline.
     I enjoyed a post-dive dressing-down from one instructor for leaving the side of her and all her other rookie divers to go 5m deeper to 25m (where another Club Med instructor on her day off was diving alone) to photograph my own instructor and her group.
     Club Med, I realised, is about giving GMs a taste of any activity other than full immersion. With scuba-diving, this equates to a lot of people doing resort courses in the pool, with a couple of heavily escorted dives in the sea.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A group of young British journalists in the press party soon became expert divers in this way and shared lots of their acquired expertise with me over the dinner table.
     The giveaway was that they kept talking about their "oxygen tanks". They told me they had already done two dives.
     "But where have you done these dives?" I asked.
     "In the pool," came the reply.
     "Well, do yourselves a favour and tell your readers you were breathing compressed air," I advised.
     "Guardian readers wouldn't know the difference anyway," was one quick retort.
     Privately, most of the Club Med instructors were able to distinguish between these resort divers and someone who had done a bit more than a couple of hours in the pool. They gave me the opportunity to get on with my job.
     However, an obviously recently certified PADI instructor was having none of that, and even after the Chief of Diving had explained the position to her, she refused to co-operate.
     Lucky I wasn't paying! I imagine few Diver readers would be happy to be kept on such a very short leash.
     "Divers must be with the instructor at all times, not one metre deeper and certainly not ahead," I was told. I replied that although I realised her job was important, I had a job to do too, and my job was important to me!
     On the next dive, I joined the back of the group and let them head off without me. The instructor never noticed I was missing, and I made sure to be back with her exactly 40 minutes into the dive when she headed - without the planned three minute safety-stop - to the surface.
     I still got into trouble for resolutely staying below her at 4m for three minutes, while she banged away on her slate at me!
     Other instructors were far more amenable and let me do what I liked, provided I stayed in sight. I was photographing them, so that wasn't difficult.
     Club Med in St Lucia has two large dive boats. One is a powered catamaran that can travel at 30 knots, carrying 50 divers with their instructors and sufficient tanks for two dives. It's so big it never felt crowded, and proved extremely stable when at rest. I never saw anyone getting seasick.
     Access to and from the vessel during diving is extremely easy, thanks to two swim platforms and a pair of big ladders. Journeys to distant dive sites could not have been quicker or more comfortable.

It's not unusual to see dolphins cavorting near the boat when in the tropics, but during one trip we saw a humpback whale lumbering along in its own beautiful way. The boat captain brought the catamaran closer to it than any skipper on a regular whale-watching trip would have done, but that suited me, because I didn't have a telephoto lens.
     When I compared the photographs, it looked remarkably similar to a whale I had photographed in the Bahamas a few weeks earlier (Diver, May). Perhaps it was the same whale, making its way south for the summer!
     I had a couple of dives on wrecks. One was a dredger at 30m. It was a bit fraught, because there was obviously no possibility of staying beyond 20 minutes and incurring any deco-stops. The instructor was clearly daunted by the depth.
     The other was on the wreck of the Lesleen M, a small freighter in around 20m which I had dived 15 years previously. At that time it was nothing more than a stark metal structure, but today the hulk is covered in corals and inhabited by thousands of fish, one of which is an enormous giant barracuda.
     Most of the diving goes on in the Anse Chastenet Marine Park, close to that famous St Lucia landmark, the twin peaks of the Pitons. There is a park fee of about US $4 per day per diver, and each group of divers must use a surface marker buoy, which inhibits those hapless instructors who don't have winder-reel skills. If a rookie diver escapes, there is no way they can give chase while wrestling with a winder and worrying about the rest of the group.
     The Club Med instructors didn't seem too concerned about showing off their knowledge of the extensive invertebrate marine life found in St Lucia, either. Not that most of the resort divers cared. They were too busy enjoying breathing under water. For my part, what I saw were mainly schooling divers.

The reefs of Anse Chastenet are thick with healthy corals and sponges, some barrel types of considerable dimension. There are also lots of reef fish now, where 15 years ago there were few.
     The night dives in those days were exciting, with all manner of crab, lobster, crinoid and other nocturnal animals crowding the reef.
     Club Med does only one night dive a week, and then only if there is sufficient demand. There wasn't and I didn't, so I cannot report on the present state of affairs. However, after five years as a marine park, the area certainly shows an improvement in daytime fish stocks.
     St Lucia offers some interesting diving for macro photographers. There are many small creatures to photograph among the soft corals, gorgonians, hard corals and sponges. You might be lucky enough to see a turtle or two, and other interesting small animals include seahorses.
     Of course, you won't be able to see any of these if you're being hustled along in a group of new divers who sink if they stop swimming, so you might be better off staying on-site at the Anse Chastenet Hotel and diving with the associated Scuba St Lucia instead.

Club Med is a great holiday experience. You get to meet a lot of people. I enjoyed the go-karting, and many people get their first taste of scuba-diving thanks to the efforts of its diving instructors. You can get a unique Club Med certification too.
     But if you already enjoy Diver, it's quite possible you are already beyond the point at which you will benefit from this particular diving experience.

John Bantin travelled at the invitation of Club Med. An all-inclusive week at Club Med St Lucia costs £740. A complete diving package for a beginner with two pool sessions and four days of diving (eight dives) costs an additional US $160. PADI and NAUI Open Water referrals (two days' diving) cost $100.

extreme-sports consultants introduce holidaymakers to the thrill of kite-surfing


go-karting


diving


wakeboarding


and wind-surfing


The dredger wreck at 30m


flotilla of divers admire the brain coral


The wreck of the freighter Lesleen M, thick with corals and reef fish, in this case soldierfish


A tubeworm makes itself at home in a sponge

THE BIG CHILL Remember The Big Blue? It was Luc Besson's movie based on the rivalry between free-divers Jacques Mayol and Enzo Majorca, an underwater film classic starring Jean-Marc Barr and Jean Reno.      Well, a new I-Max film soon to be released is an updated version of the story. Called Ocean Men, it features the rivalry between those two modern giants of the free-diving world, former-Cuban José "Pipin" Ferreras and the Italian Umberto Pelizzari. This time, the men are played by themselves. I know Pelizzari (above) has great respect for both Mayol and Majorca, and I took the chance to talk to him about the movie while at Club Med St Lucia.      "We undertook dives in all of the different disciplines of free-diving, from constant-weight to no-limits," he told me. "I was completely available for a direct competition with Pipin. He did not accept.      "It seemed that it was not possible to have the two of us on the same boat during filming. Pipin refused to allow it. He said it was too dangerous and that I would try too hard to out-perform him and kill myself. I said that he didn't have to worry about my health. My mother could do that!"      According to Pelizzari, the film crew frequently told him that Pipin was very difficult to work with. In the closing sequence of the movie the two men are shown shaking hands. Pipin, I was told, would not agree to do that. A couple of stand-in actors had to be used for the filming.      Pelizzari is now 35. I asked him how he felt about younger people entering the sport and taking the records for themselves. "You must have respect for all people. It is easier to train when nobody knows you and nothing is expected of you."      And his last word on Pipin? "'E's an 'assle!" At least, I think that's what he said! (If you understand Italian check out www.umbertopelizzari.com)