UKDIVING CLUBFOCUS
Full boats at Bach Island, annual Oban trip
Lee Chapman ponders big diving questions
18 experienced divers ready to explore The Garvellachs
Ollie Burke celebrates a training dive
That’ s a lot of less experienced divers. How do you manage to give them all the experience they need to progress?
The club has a strong policy of inclusion regardless of background, age, gender or ability. We do not have cliques or private dives: a club dive or dive trip is open to everyone in the club, provided they are suitably qualified for the event. We organise trips specifically designed for novice diver training and experience. We do, however, find it difficult to offer depth progression locally, our coastline is too shallow. We also sometimes struggle to get pool access
32 for large-scale training events such as instructor training.
We have very low drop-out rates now. If people leave us, it is because they are giving up diving or leaving the area; and, actually, many stay with us despite moving away.
Where do you meet?
Once a month we use a private venue that can accommodate about 100 people, where we can deliver lectures and some practical training including Skill Development Courses and basic life support training. We also have a monthly two-hour pool session for training, try dives and general use by club members
Iona Garland and Donna Sunley prepping for a training trip and their families. The new generation of planners and organisers has set up a system of training in winter, from one October intake, plus an increasing amount of interesting diving in summer, supported by some back-office improvements.
What back-office changes did you make?
We are digital first and paperless to support the environment. We have a strong focus on technology to support club operations. We make use of many freely available IT services to enhance our communication, training and logistics. We have built an ABSAC App which works on all mobile platforms and has useful forms, guides and checklists( for example, a boat launching and recovery checklist) that all club members can access.
Let’ s talk about going diving.
Members dive all year round. In winter we dive in a local granite quarry when the weather is bad( which is pretty much from September to March). In summer we dive on the local Aberdeen coastline and the Moray coast, which is a 45-minute drive away. We do shore dives and RIB dives; in total, members logged more than 2,000 dives in the past year.