Plan ahead to ensure the diving calendar is fully booked

Photo: Yo-Han's buddy Roisin Maddison discusses upcoming trips with Sally Walsh of St Abbs Charters

The truly committed UK diver should always plan well in advance, says Yo-Han Cha.

I am not the kind of person that has a five-year plan or a one-year plan for that matter, unless it’s dive trip related. For dive trips, I’m all over it and I’ll usually have pretty much all of my year’s diving booked by the previous December. 

It’s UK diving that has made me this way. I used to go backpacking with very minimal planning. I’d perhaps have a few things I’d like to see and do, but the rest of the trip would be a blank slate. It led to more spontaneity, learning locally what was fun to do (or not) as well as occasional mistakes and wrong turnings, but that all added to the adventure.

As much as I’d love to be more spontaneous and perhaps dive where the weather looks to be good, it’s very difficult to charter dive boats without planning ahead. When I first got into UK diving, I tried to book spaces on dive trips a massive three months in advance (which I thought was being really prepared at the time!), only to be met with disappointment as boat after boat was full.

Therefore, I had no choice but to book trips much further ahead, which can be up to a year in advance. In the last few years though, having moved to Bristol, I’ve found that shore diving on the South Coast is possible to do on day trips so that last minute spontaneous dive trip is back on the agenda again. I just need to keep some weekends free for that! 

Different clubs organise their trips at different times and as a fairly new member of Reading BSAC, I’ve found them to be very organised in their dive trip planning. The sign-up night for 2024’s diving was in September 2023, which wasn’t out of character for them. In order to give everyone a fair chance at their preferred trips, each member’s first two picks were done via a lottery before we were released from our shackles to sign up for as many trips as we wanted to. One of the reasons I’m still a member of Reading BSAC, despite no longer living there, is the number of dive trips they put on.

As much as I’d love to be more spontaneous and perhaps dive where the weather looks to be good, it’s very difficult to charter dive boats without planning ahead

I’m always having to be mindful of the amount of annual leave I have versus all the dive trips I want to go on. Unfortunately, I can’t go on them all and I just have to choose. And Reading BSAC can’t have all my dive trips! There’s my trips with Clifton SAC and the Bristol Underwater Photography Group to fit in. I just can’t fit them all in! Unfortunately, the Scottish Nudibranch Festival will have to wait until 2025. Such are the sacrifices I am forced to make.

Some of my diving buddies have only started to discuss dive trips in the crazily late months of January and February, and I sadly find myself turning many of these down as my year’s full up. I’m not sad that I’m going to the ones I’ve booked on, I’m sad that I can’t do it all! Perhaps I should risk my work manager’s wrath and ask if I can buy more annual leave... or is there a way of cloning myself and experience two dive trips at the same time? I want to go on all of them, but I can only be in one place at one time!

Article 'Reservation spares perspiration' by Yo-Han Cha first published in SCUBA magazine, Issue 145 May 2024.