It was a really great holiday. The money issues were sorted out fairly quickly by giving some random yank a lift down to the coast & him chipping in for fuel. Also, just simply taking the decision not to spend any money. It’s amazing how little you need to spend sometimes, even in the South of France. I’ve got a fridge in the van, the wherewithal to cook all my meals, to camp out - to do everything I need to do. Money - it’s overrated at times. No need to be kept prisoner by the lack of it.
To be honest what I really needed from the trip was some sun. It had been pissing down in Chamonix for a month and we all had cabin fever. The weather down on the coast was amazing. Hot English summer type weather; 27+ degrees & sunny, with a sea breeze in the evenings to cool off. Perfect.
So anyway, I turned up in Antibes on Tuesday night and met up with Alex in the Blue Lady. One of the snottiest, yachtiest bars in a town famous for snotty yachtiness. He sorted me out with my hotel and let me know where to meet him the next day for the diving. All that side of things was already paid for you see :) So 8:30am I was at the Port Gallice getting my kit together and hanging out in the van. Since I’ve carpeted it and removed a row of seats has actually become a very handy place to hang out. It’s 2 years since I last dived and I was pretty nervy. I’m probably getting a bit old, but diving can be pretty dangerous and there’s not much room for screwing things up.
But there were no problems. 2 great dives during the day off an lighthouse just off the coast from Antibes. Then it was time to start the learnin’. I was there to do some further diving qualification with Alex - to become qualified to dive on Nitrox. There are many good reasons to dive on Nitrox (normal air with extra oxygen added to it) - safety and longer bottom times are the usual reasons, but for me it is also that diving on Nitrox is a far nicer experience than diving on air. Less headaches, less tiredness at the end of the day, and frankly having load more oxygen in your system is always going to feel great.
It’s the best drug in the world, Oxygen. Impossible to overdose, and a cure-all for pretty much everything that ails you. Just a shame it’s so damn expensive to buy medicinal oxygen. The only problem with diving on Nitrox is that breathing too much oxygen at depth can cause a contidition called Oxygen Toxicity. This makes a diver convulse and pass out. Not neccessarily dangerous in itself, but underwater you’re bound to spit out your regulator and drown immediately. So that’s a risk you have to manage with proper training and dive tables etc.
So that evening, an imrovised dinner at the hotel followed by a couple of drinks on the promenade in Juan Les Pins as the sun went down. I went to bed a very happy man. The next day’s diving was even better. 2 great dives off the Cap d’Antibes, this time breathing 33% Nitrox mix. It makes such a difference to the quality of the dives.
Alex was getting frustrated with me for not knowing anything about the theory of partial pressures etc. It’s 13 years since I did my original open water course and learned how to plan dives properly with tables that I simply didn’t remember how to do it. I dive on a computer, and they take care of all that stuff for you. So lunchtime was a 2 hour theory lesson over lunch before the second dive of the day, and then back to Alex’s place to take the exam. Amazingly I passed it the first time around with a decent score and bosh - I’m now a qualified Nitrox diver meaning I can buy enriched air fills from any dive operation offering the service all over the world.
Diving with Alex was a pleasure. Alex and I are friends (me having been his first ever client when he set up his business), but as a diver he’s a consumate professional dive instructor and he took me through my course and dived with me for 2 days in such a calm, collected way it made the whole course an absolute pleasure. There’s a little film in the pipeline - an advert for Diamond Diving - coming in a week or so.
So that was that. Friday night I left Antibes around 6pm, and drove an hour or so inland past Grasse (the town from the book ‘Perfume’), had dinner in a small village brasserie and then carried on for a while until I found a deserted parking spot near Castellane in Haute Provence. With all the kit - tent, air matress, water, stove for coffee in the morning, camping is an easy pleasure and set me up for the rest of the drive back to Chamonix the next day.
So a great trip. Well planned, well executed and successful in all regards. And now, back in Chamonix, the weather has finally turned & it’s hot and sunny. Summer weather at last.
