The Rez

Post date: Nov 22, 2010 8:15:11 AM

The Rez,

What can be said, you arrive down a tiny lane after following what seems to be a demented satnav, telling you to take this or that impossibly narrow lane, to be greeted with a small parking area, an area of grass with some posts sticking out of it and a few buildings scattered loosely.

We climbed from the cars after just under two hours of driving and surveyed "The Rez", at first glance it appears to be a few buildings in a valley, surrounded by trees and country side, but in the centre of the valley there lies an area the size of two cricket pitches, with 2ft high posts sticking up where the pockets of a snooker tables would be.

Ten minutes later, Martin, comes out of the house to the rear of the Rez and his wife disappears into a building just off to the left. At which point we notice the toilet "shed" is slightly behind and on the side of the hill. Well shed doesn't do it justice, it may have been a shed at first, but now it's insulated and has curtains and heaters inside, plus a propoer toilet, sink , hand gel and drier. The start of discovering the facilities the Rez has to offer is a surprise, we were expecting a portaloo.

So Martin comes out and takes us into the cafe which will be there for our sole use allday. He runs us through probably one of the most thorough and funny site briefs I have ever heard, then takes us over to the entrance point. A 2m x 2m 2 3m deep concrete lined hole, with a 1m diameter hole in the base of one wall. Slightly intimidating as it looks a bit small and confined.

Brief over and we take it in turns with Tamworth Toads to kit up ( actually we stay in the cafe drinking gorgeous hot chocolate and looking at the homemade cake selection, while the Toads get kitted and going ) Then we finally get kitted up, and I jump in with the rest of the club.

I'm first down the entrance and get to view the hole in the wall at close proximity, just behind it is another similar sized hole and another wall. Right torches on and in we go. Through the two holes and it opens up into a 3m x 3m room with another hole off to the left, more darkness there.

A quick turn left and I'm into the Rez "proper" a 40m x 20m underground reservoir with various baffles so that you can't swim directly from one end to the other.

Now, I'm sure I'm not spoiling it now, but the first thing you see when entering the Rez proper is a skeleton attached to the bottom. All of a sudden this had me giggling like I was a school boy, my first thoughts are of the fairground horror rides, that have more fun about them than fright. A quick scoot back to the entrance and I popped up to tel them this was f*cking hilarious and get their arses down here :-D

What followed was nearly an hour of underwater hilarity, turning your torches off and trying to scoot round in pitch black to be able to blast your buddy at close range with a torch flash in the face, or even beter score a darkenss pat on the head. (I was at a disadvantage here becasue the kiss dispalys have a backlight which cant be turned off unless they are off, and I wasn't going that far) ther are a few things to see and its very atmospheric as a dive site. It's best to use back up torches and small (i.e. less than 250 lumen) torch. Between our club we had just under 10,000 lumens in the water (amongst 6 of us) and to be honest by the end of the first dive, we had all changed to the back up torches :-D

Lunch was a delight, really, the food was amazing fresh and tasty and the cakes were apparently great as well.

Second dive was a little bit more serious where we practiced line laying and spent more time without our lights on, although a short while was spent playing underwater, lights off, tag :-D.

All in all a fantastic day and something different to the usual Saturday at Stoney.

Costs are £15 per head with a minimum of 12 people and I'd like to thank the Tamworth Toads again as without them we wouldn't have been able to make the minimum numbers and they were a great bunch to dive with.

Try it, it really is the deepest 2m dive you'll ever do :-D