Diving 2006

Diving

     

 

Dive in Ukkel, Belgium, Nemo 33: Monday September 18, 2006

It has been a while since we submerged with a dive bottle and we will soon leave to Santorini and die there a bit. So we go for a dive with the people of Scubacollege. We have made appointment in the cafeteria of Nemo 33. We find it easily, just take the exit on the Brussels Ring “Drogenbos, Ruisbroek”, then follow direction Ukkel and the first roundabout is Nemo 33. This is the deepest pool of Belgium and even of the whole world. We pay and Dimi arranges it all well. We change and then go to the pool with snorkel, mask and fins. Then they give a short briefing in French-Flemish, ten minutes snorkeling and then we can dive. There is a storm of people to the gear, we have to prepare everything ourselves (how did we need to do this again?) and then we go into the water. Dimi joins us and they guide us to the deepest part of the pool. There Rudy and Peter take over. Eef goes together with Peter to 33 meter and Rudy goes with Timo to 24. For Eef it went fine and she had not problems with her ears. For Timo it was different; he goes to 24 meter and then back up. He waits for Eef and then the both of them go and practice. We do the pivot and our ‘Joda’ being under water. There are two air bubbles under water in Nemo. One is decorated as a cave and the other one as a submarine. It’s nice: here you can remove the regulator and speak to each other and then dive again. In small stages we go up again, stop once at 10 meter and another time at 5. We hang out longer at 1à meter, because we can see inside the cafeteria here and watch National Geographic on the TV here. Cool. We practice some more: to be correctly buoyant at low depth and then suddenly we hear loud ticking: iron on iron. This means we need to get out of the water: it’s the end of the one-hour session. We set everything back on its place, take a shower and have a drink. We went into the water at 09:00 and now it’s already 22:30. After a drink and filling out our logbooks we drive from Ukkel to home. At home we clean everything and go immediately to bed. We’re tired and Timo needs to get up early to bring Linda and Patrick to Zaventem airport.