MY OTHER PASSION IS...
A shared desire for adventure led Bart and Elly Willems to take up scuba diving and discover a new life exploring dive sites on their own specially equipped Canados motoryacht
In 2000 my wife Elly and I took up scuba diving. We’re both adventurous types and wanted to find a water sport activity that we could enjoy together. We joined the local dive club and undertook all the necessary safety training. Our first dives were in a chilly flooded quarry but we loved it – preparing and checking the equipment, spotting the occasional fish and meeting new friends. Our dive trips always seemed to end with drinks and a good meal as we relived the highlights of the day.
As our skills grew (Elly is now a three-star CMAS diver and I am a CMAS instructor) we expanded our horizons to the Dutch waters around Zeeland, the Rhine estuary, the Maas and the Schelde. Diving here is a challenge due to the strong tides and restricted visibility but not only do these murky waters enhance your skill levels as a diver, they are also rich in marine life with huge lobsters, crabs and cuttlefish to observe.
The summit of North Sea diving is wreck diving, and after extended preparations a group of us cruised out in our own boats to explore some of the 1000+ wrecks on the sea bed here.
With our dive club we also joined several trips to Egypt, some of them on a liveaboard dive boat. If you want crystal clear, warm water at an affordable budget, Egypt is ideal: colourful corals, clownfish, parrot fish, eagle rays and octopuses… just like the ones I saw on television as a kid.
We also did a few liveaboard dive trips in the Maldives, the boat travelling between the reefs and atolls to find the best dive spots. For us, that’s the place to be, spotting reef sharks, tiger sharks and occasionally hammerhead and whale sharks. But the highlight of the Maldives are the manta rays. These huge (up to 5m wide) creatures swim past within touching distance and are breathtaking to behold. We also did a trip to Palau and Yap in Micronesia to dive on World War II wrecks and see amazing creatures like the nautilus, a prehistoric living fossil.
But still many of the best memories we have are of our own dive trips with a small group of friends on my own trailable boat – a 26ft Karnic. Equipped with a 300-bar compressor we towed it to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, the west coast of Scotland and the South of France. For us this is the ultimate adventure, planning our own dives, living close to nature on the boat and preparing our catch of the day.
As our diving ambitions grew, so did our boating hobby. In 2011 we bought a secondhand 75ft Canados. Built in 1991, it needed quite a bit of work doing to it so we set about restoring and equipping it for more luxurious diving trips. We fitted twin 300-bar compressors to refill our diving tanks, a hi-lo bathing platform with rails to carry them and an access door to the utility room. We even added fin stabilizers to hold her steady at anchor. The end result is the ultimate liveaboard diving boat.
Since then we have cruised the Mediterranean from the South of France to Montenegro, Croatia, Italy and Sardinia. In all the places we visited we organised dive trips with friends, some of which we have posted about on the mby.com forum. Our passion for diving may have started in a cold, sandy quarry but it opened the door to a whole new world of boating fun.