by Jane Jackson
Somehow one expects a lie-in on a Saturday at this time of
year, so what were we doing crawling out of bed in the middle of the night on
this particular Saturday? Answer: going to Brussels to dive a 35m deep
indoor pool on the outskirts of the city.
Sixteen of us (thirteen from Bermondsey, and three from
DAGSAC) met at seven o’clock in the morning on an overcast November Saturday at
St. Pancras International for a weekend in Brussels, under the excellent
organisational skills of Victor. After an uneventful train journey to
Brussels and bus and metro ride across Brussels to the hotel (Brussels has an
excellent system whereby you buy one ticket which covers your entire journey
including changes provided you take no longer than forty minutes). We
dumped our bags, and set off to explore and find lunch (pizza and pasta for the
group I was with), before meeting up at the hotel to check in and set off for
Nemo 33.
The White Hotel is worth a comment, as it had pretensions to
display the development of art and design in Belgium since 1945. I don’t
know if all rooms had copies of a small coffee table book describing such
development, but there was one in my room, along with a cast of a sculpture of
a bull’s head. There was certainly a significant effort at style, whether
or not successful (I’ll let my fellow divers decide). Other things included a
bike in the foyer, and the lifts which were idiosyncratically typical of this
type of hotel where the users of the lift have to open the doors, but they also
had small representations of human figures variously painted on the doors and
wall. Nevertheless, it was a comfortable hotel with a good variety of food
for breakfast and served until 11.00, which other hotels could learn from, not
that we were able to take full advantage of it, as we had to be at Nemo by then.
Back to Nemo 33. This dive centre cum restaurant
resides in the outskirts of Brussels, the most significant thing about it being
the pit which (according to my computer) was 35.1m deep at the bottom. The
whole pool is about 20m square with a temperature near that of warm bath
water. There are varying depths, immediately on entry it must be about
1.5m, where everyone mills around putting on fins (as you are not allowed to
jump in you have to walk down the steps, although on our second dive, a number
of people from the other group diving, insisted on stopping on the steps to put
their fins on – understandable if less than 5’4”, but not if 6ft!). Much
of the pool is split between 10m and 15m depth, where we were allowed to
practice freediving for the first ten minutes of the session. Then back
out to put on scuba kit and back in again to explore the rest of the
pool. In one corner was the 35m octagonal pit, reached either by swimming across
directly to it or through a swim through, which had a couple of underwater
caves at either side which could be surfaced. I was diving with Mariette
and on the first dive, when it was just our group plus three others, there was
nothing to worry about as we all descended steadily to the bottom, variously
amused ourselves for the 10 minutes that we were allowed down there, doing fin
pivots etc. A nice slow ascent, another mill in the 10 and 15m areas,
until the session finished. This was followed by a very pleasant Thai meal
in the bar area, quite mild which I prefer. Return to hotel and off to a
local bar for a few drinks before turning in.
The next day’s dive was a little more exciting as we shared
our session with another group of about 30 people with very varying
skills. Most of them plunged straight down the pit, and after Mariette and
I had suffered being bumped into several times, we gave up and pottered around
for 10 minutes or so in the shallow bit with Victor and Ken, who seemed to have
come to a similar conclusion. However, as 10 minutes is the maximum time
permitted to be below 20m, we just had to bide our time before everyone else
came up and we could descend ourselves. The most interesting thing with
all those people expelling all that air in a confined space was that it so
reduced the water pressure in the pit that it created a significant current
pulling us towards the pit.
This was followed by a stroll round Brussels, people
variously visiting art galleries, museums, finding a nice lunch somewhere,
before we all met up again at the Gare du Midi for a smooth journey back to St
Pancras, disregarding the tedium of having to go through UK Border Control
twice!
