There are many organisations that offer diver training, both in UK waters and abroad. Many people choose to learn to dive with one of the commercial diving operations, such as PADI. Other people’s first experiences of diving will be on holiday, where they have tried a number of dives in clear tropical waters. We already have a large number of members who have done their initial training in this way and are now active members of the club.

Join the Club
If you’re fairly new to diving there are a lot of advantages to joining a local club. We are a friendly crowd and welcome new people to come along and meet us. We meet regularly throughout the winter on a Wednesday evening and in the summer months we go diving. We have two boats, with permanent moorings in Brighton Marina and this is where most of our dives are based from. The boats are both fast RIBs and have an operating range of up to 15 nautical miles from the marina entrance. After the dive you will often find us in the bar of the West Quay.

The annual branch subscription is £180 which you can pay as £15 a month by standing order. If you trained with another organisation you will also need to pay the BSAC membership fee of £50 up front (in subsequent years this is included within your branch subscription).

The cost of diving from the RIBs is quite modest £6 for an inshore reef/drift dive and £8-15 for an offshore wreck dive.

For more information please get in touch or contact one of the Committee Members.

Diving from Brighton
So what sort of diving can you expect to do? Brighton has an awful lot to offer to suit a wide range of interests. There are a number of inshore reefs, all with a wide variety of marine life. Over the past few years we have been working with the "Sussex Seasearch" project to survey and record all the different species of fish, crustacea, echinods, molluscs and the like, together with the habitat details. If you’re interested in underwater conservation then take a look at the Seasearch web site.

Tides off Brighton run at about 1 knot. This is fast enough to make for interesting drift dives, but slow enough to be manageable if you want to stop and look at something interesting.

But what Brighton is really good for is the wrecks. The English Channel offers some of the best wreck diving in the world, with hundreds of large shipwrecks in diveable depths. Off Brighton alone there are over 50 shipwrecks within 15 miles of the marina entrance. Apart from the thrill of diving the wrecks themselves, they also form huge artificial reefs which are havens for a wide variety of marine life.

Expeditions
Our Expeditions Officer arranges diving trips to some of the best sites in the UK and around the world. In previous years we have chartered a live-aboard dive boat from Oban on the West cost to Firth of Forth on the East coast, circumnavigated Scotland diving en route. We had an expedition to Norway and then later in the same year an expedition to Northern France. Last year we went to Southern Ireland and in the coming year are planning a return trip to Norway.

The club holiday is usually arranged some time over the summer months. In recent years we have visited Devon, Cornwall, Pembrokeshire, Dorset and Gozo. This years holiday is to Brixham where we shall be diving on a number of local wrecks and inshore reefs.

Social Events
Apart from the diving we also have an active social calendar. There are our regular meets on a Wednesday evening. But we have also arranged various activities such as quiz nights, brewery visits, summer barbecues, barn dances, race nights, gentleman’s evenings … and more.