This is a shout out to support my friends at Aquanaut in Kingston Upon Thames, just a 10 minute bicycle ride from my home.

I turned to the lovely people at Aquanaut in May 2019 to upskill my diving so that I could enjoy my favourite sport at all times of the year and not just when on holiday. Their training and equipment advice has enabled me to get to where I am today.

https://aquanautscuba.co.uk

I'd just completed the Advanced Scuba Diver training in the Azores on holiday and I was hungry for more. So it was about find the kit, find the people to train me, identify the courses to do and get cracking.

I kicked off with the dry suit course and it spiralled from there until I realised in August 2020 that I'd already done way more speciality courses than required to apply for PADI Master Scuba Diver, so I applied for that and I was then done with courses - I wanted to just get diving hours under my belt to get better as we never stop learning. In particular it was about managing my air consumption more, or in other words learning to just chill the heck out so I didn't chew through air which makes the dive shorter.

An average air consumption according to PADI is about 15 Litres of air per minute at surface pressure. To work out what that means in terms of absolute volume of air used per minute at depth you use this forumla:

Absolute Air Consumption Per Minute = 

     Surface Air Consumption x ( Depth in metres / 10 + 1)

So at 10 metres depth with a surface consumption of 15 litres per minute that would make 30 litres per minute. I was between 15 and 18 litres per minute which wasn't bad, but it's always more at the beginning of the dive when you start and also if you get into a bit of a pickle and things don't go exactly as planned.

Well I'm now down to my PB of 8 Litres per minute at my most Zen at Wraysbury on a hot summer's day when the lake temperature was at 23 C last August so things have improved somewhat!

Thank you Ian, Lynne, James B, James W, Matt, Greg, Alex and co. for the fantastic experiences your team has given me which has improved my diving no end and which has also opened up this new world of democratising the tech enabling our industry.