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Just thought I’d a do a trip report of sorts on my Chamber dive yesterday.
I’ve been meaning to do one for years but never got round to it and haven’t been available to do other ones which clubs have organised.
I’ve looked around a few chambers, one in Millport and the London Dive Chamber. The dive I did was at London’s sister unit, the Midlands Dive Chamber.
After battling the sodding traffic on the M1 I arrived in Rugby (bit posh wouldn’t mind living there), place was very easy to find and was greeted by nice friendly staff.
Signed the usual medical and handed over the money. There were 9 of us there and it was £40 each which may sound a bit steep compared to dive site entry fees etc, however I think the overall experience was defiantly worth this money.
I hadn’t really thought about it other than the narcosis at depth, so was a bit surprised when they told us to put on scrubs – didn’t bother me at all and when they said why it all made sense. Luckily they let us keep underwear on....and my giraffe socks....
So after the blokes got changed us ladies popped in the changing room and put our sexy new outfits on.
We were given a safety briefing and they went through the dive plan, what exactly would happen. Told about noises and temperatures etc...we then had to complete a short test – very simple, comprised of circling all of the L’s in a section of writing.
All in all very thorough and entertaining brief.
so off we all went into the chamber with our bottles of water and took a seat.
It took us about 5 mins to drop to 50m depth which I guess is actually quite slow however I found myself having to equalise every two seconds. The heat from the air coming in as we dropped was immense, it was like when you step off the plane in a hot country and the hot air just hits you.
Around 37m I started to feel very jolly and leant round to tell my friend a joke, when I spoke we both fell about laughing as I sounded like I’d been breathing a tonne of helium – then when the guys started talking, that was it, I couldn’t stop laughing!!
Several silly moments later we were at max depth, we were given a duplicate piece of text and had to circle all the L’s again.
we had 6 minutes on the bottom, I remember mostly laughing about nothing – oh dear haha. We had some balloons and bits of neoprene in there with us which you could see had shrunk loads as we expected.
On the way back up it got reallllly cold!! I was glad of the giraffe socks. We put O2 masks on during ascent which also made me laugh as at the time I thought my darth vader impression was hysterical – evidently it wouldn’t have been but hey I was martinied up! As indicated by my oh so sexy mask in pic....
After the dive we were debrifed and given our scores for our letter circling activity....I won’t lie, I came last, however the picture below indicates while I should have been circling letters I was in fact laughing about something. Most people were out by about 10 letters at depth (I was out by 18...oops!!).
I’ll stop blabbering on, but as a summary, for anyone who is thinking about doing one – do it! It’s a fantastic experience and so funny. Thank you to SCUBA MK for organising it and the staff at the midlands dive chamber who were so knowledgeable and accommodating. It’s certainly made me feel less nervous should I ever have to use one for real.
It’s also indicated to me I got a lot more narked than I thought I would.... but being that I’m a bit nuts any way, it’s really difficult to tell!
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. Its a definite eye opener for personal nark, i was with a few friends and we were all mullered at max depth. very odd feeling but worth doing it for the experience. 
Originally Posted by lucylemonshark 
