Hello everyone.
When I was in my early teenage years (back in the mid 1990s), I learned to do some scuba diving. I was a high school pupil back then, and one of my teachers became one of my scuba diving instructors.
The first thing I did was get an assessment. However, living in Felixstowe, in Suffolk, it involved travelling to some rural village in Essex. The journey was a lot more worthwhile than I expected, because not only was I an able swimmer from my junior school days (in the late 1980s and early 1990s), but the person who did the assessment told me that I was one of the first autistic people in the UK to learn to scuba dive, or maybe even the first, which would be quite an achievement for me.
After I had my assessment, the next step was to buy some scuba diving equipment. Being 6 foot 5 inches tall, and with size 12 feet, it was important that everything I needed actually fit me comfortably. I don't know how much a complete scuba diving kit cost me back in the mid 1990s, but at current prices, they can cost a fortune (over a thousand pounds in some cases).
The scuba diving experience as a whole was fantastic. I learned all the basic lessons, my tutors (some of my lessons involved two tutors as supposed to just one), and I loved the general feeling of being underwater. I remember learning to scuba dive at my local reservoir facility, which was Alton Water near Ipswich. It was by far the closest I will ever get to scuba diving in somewhere like the Mediterranean Sea or whatever.
However, my main lessons took place quite late in the evening, and in many cases I ended up coming home at midnight, which is no good for me. If the diving equipment was expensive, the lessons themselves were not exactly cheap, and although my parents provided car travel assistance, that can cost a bit of money in terms of the fuel.
Has anyone else had any positive or negative experiences of scuba diving? Hopefully my story will make interesting reading, and that you have some interesting stories yourself.
