Santo’s President Coolidge may well be one of the world’s great wreck dives but, to this reluctant diver of deep, dark innards, plunging 40 metres to get to a hole in a deck, then dropping head-first inside it to make your way along an eerie corridor so you can plant your lips on “The Lady” (a ritual for anyone diving on the President Coolidge, I’m told), falls well into the realm of those long effected by nitrogen narcosis.
I couldn’t do it on the first dive and I was barely able to contain myself on the second. Loved photographing the rest of the ship (below) mind you; in and out and swimming around all things rusting and encrusted on the ocean bed – but swimming in dark, confined spaces, following the tiny beam of a flash light 40 metres beneath the surface – give me land diving any day.