Scuba Diving

I live in Copenhagen, Denmark. There's half a dozen scuba clubs in the area, and I'm a member of one of them. I got my speedboat license and the club trained me to take one of the boats out. I'm hoping to get the training for the second (larger) boat this year.

This means anytime I feel like going diving, and the weather is forgiving, I have a whole boat of people who want to tag along. I have a core group of people I dive a lot with, but basically anyone in the dive club is a very decent diver. Most of them have hundreds of dives, some of them in the thousands, and some of them at levels I can't even begin to completely fathom. Very hardcore technical stuff, sidemount CCR in Norwegian caves and stuff.

Dive clubs cost money because they're expensive to run. I pay about 15€/$20 per month. With that, we get a full trimix filling station with either partial pressure or continuous blending (doing my tech blender course this afternoon), a fully stocked workshop, 2 boats + trailers, a trailer for gear when we're going on longer trips, 4-10 trips per year abroad (not included in the club fee, obviously), washing and drying room, storage for gear, cylinders, etc. Air fills are free and unlimited, nitrox/helitrox/trimix obviously we have to pay for the gases we use, but the club sells oxygen and helium at-cost. We also have a bar with at-cost drinks.

We have old-timers in the club who have been diving for 40-50 years. Some of them still dive to this day. They are a wealth of information.

If you have the gear and want to dive multiple times a week, year-round, then joining a club is definitely worth it.