January 15

I dived a lot as a young man. Went to the Red Sea and had some fantastic experiences, and then… Nothing.

For years I didn’t dare go diving for the sake of my ears. I have tinnitus, and it’s difficult to cope with as it is from time to time, I don’t need more of it, and so that fear – and the fact that my wife wasn’t overly keen – made me try to forget diving, but I couldn’t. And so last year in the Dominican Republic I decided to give it a try, and almost ended up swimming with a humpback whale.

With this in mind, I knew diving would be one of the things I did this year. But it’s not advisable to just suit up and jump in the ocean like I did in the DR, so I figured I needed to try my gills in a more controlled environment. Luckily, Brussels is host to Nemo33, the deepest indoor pool in the world.

 

And so I found myself entering a crowded foyer this Saturday morn, jostling fifty or so Belgians who had had the same idea as me. It was a quarter to twelve and I was on a tight schedule, as my son needed a ride to a friend in two hours. Since they only let people in on the hour, and the one woman manning the reception desk moved with continental speed, I figured it wasn’t going to work, but two decades in this country has taught me a thing or two.

I left the queue and went to the bar, where a man who was obviously a diving instructor was seated (Just the thing! Drunk diving!). I asked him if he knew how I should go about things if I wanted to dive, and he immediately got the woman out from the reception desk (while the fifty other divers-in-spe stood and looked on, grim-faced), got her to sign me in (“No PADI card? I don’t have time to look you up. What level are you? Advanced? Ok, in you go.”) and five minutes later I was kitting up on the edge of the pool with Yves, my new dive buddy.

Turns out diving is a lot like riding a bicycle (apart from the fact that you don’t have to assemble your bike every time you want to go biking), so once I was in the water it was as if it were only yesterday. The free divers have the deep part of the pool to themselves for the first ten minutes of every hour, but Yves had us on the edge of the abyss before anyone else, and so we were the first to slowly descend into the part of the pool that gives Nemo33 its name – a man-made blue hole, the depth of a ten-story building. It’s an awesome feeling, looking up at the surface from such a distance, and it wasn’t made any less impressive by the sight of groups of divers slowly drifting down towards us in clouds of bubbles.

Once they were down, though, it was a different story. Think blubbery seals boldly bouncing into each other whilst taking selfies and you have a fairly accurate picture. So we made our way up again and spent the rest of the dive exploring the tunnels and caves (“zey zerve ze champagne here”, Yves informed me, as we briefly stopped in the largest one), made faces at the people in the restaurant on the other side of the windows, and generally amused ourselves as best we could – Yves had me take off my fins and “run” on the pool floor and then onto the wall and perform a backflip, Kung fu-movie style.

It was a good experience, though, and it served its purpose, showing me that I can dive. As I got out of the pool and gravity reasserted its grip on me, I felt elated, and more than ready to take this old/new adventure to the next level: a live-aboard diving safari in the Andaman Sea off of Thailand! Watch this space…