When, where, how did you learn to dive?
I was lucky that when I was young my parents took us to South America and the Caribbean so I’d had a chance to snorkel in some wonderful places and knew that there were amazing things to see in the ocean then I think it was at some point in my early twenties that I became aware that regular people were able to go scuba diving. It seemed to be an incredibly exciting thing to do and I decided that it was something I really wanted to try.
In 1995, when I was getting ready to leave the UK and move back to Perth for good, a friend and I signed up for a PADI Open Water course consisting of lessons in an indoor swimming pool in Essex, then completing our qualifying dives in the Red Sea at Sharm el Sheikh. Of course I just absolutely loved it and my only regret was that we spent just one week in Sharm and we should have spent a month!
When I returned to Australia I couldn’t afford to go diving but my sister gave me a gift of a day trip to Rottnest and after that I decided that I really wanted to continue diving whenever possible. During that time I also gave up smoking and saved all the dollars that I would have spent on smoking so I could purchase ex-rental BCD and regs from Perth Diving Academy