Diving in the Netherlands is nothing like diving in the Caribbean Sea! Does this surprise any of you? I’m not going to say I didn’t know this, but I did go into this whole diving experience a bit foolishly. First of all, I rocked up to Soul Divers diving school in the morning completely convinced I would be able to wear a shortie…

Diving Gear

I couldn’t have been more wrong! In the Netherlands, you can’t dive with a shortie. Not even in the summer, so I had to wear a full body suit. Not only that, it had to be a 7mm thick suit. I once wrote a blog post about J-Bay, South Africa where I stated I gave up trying to put a full body suit on. I had the exact same problem this time but giving up on a diving trip is different than giving up a short swim so I persisted. This post obviously is not going to end with: “… in the end I didn’t manage so I gave up” and it’s not going to end with “so I went diving in my bikini”, so I’m sure I won’t spoil it for you when I say I managed to put it on in the end.

The suit wasn’t the only thing we had to wear a hoodie, boots and gloves were also required. If you go diving in the Netherlands, gloves aren’t always necessary. This particular dive site has coral walls made of shells and mussels, so if you don’t wear gloves and you touch them they can leave pretty deep cuts.

Dive Spot

I can hear you wondering where this shell covered dive spot for which you have to wear an attire that covers your entire body is. It’s actually in Zeeland, a province in the Netherlands, in a “lake” called Grevelingen.

I put lake in parentheses because it became a lake due to the Delta Works. The lake is constantly refreshed with salty sea water from the North Sea.

This means there is quite a lot of life underwater. I could’ve actually put that statement in parentheses too, because “a lot” is certainly up for discussion. This year, I’ve been diving in Curacao and Bonaire and the past few years I’ve snorkelled in locations like Great Barrier Reef and the Red Sea. The sea life in these locations is not comparable to life underwater in the Netherlands.

Underwater Critters

That having been said, I did see some things I’ve never seen before in other locations. There were many lobsters. Where you would normally find Muraena lurking from caves, here you can find lobsters.

There are also a lot of crabs. Crabs fighting, crabs crawling, crabs hiding, crabs running, crabs chilling. If you’ve never seen a crab before you’d love it here.

Other than that, I’ve only seen small fish.

Like I said before, the walls are made of shells and mussels so the surroundings look quite surreal. That’s also nice about diving in this particular site.

Murky Waters

There could be more sea life than what I spotted, but it’s simply impossible to see. This is the first dive site where I actually had difficulty seeing much at all. I didn’t make it easier for myself either. The sea floor and coral wall are quite sandy, which means you have to keep still. I’m a rookie diver at best, which means I’m often flapping my arms around. Sand and flapping arms, don’t go well together. Especially if visibility when keeping still is around 7 metres. Most of my time was spent looking for my buddy because it’s difficult to keep track of each other when you’re in such murky water.

Photography

As you can see below most of the underwater photography, these photos are thanks to Sandra Vennix who accompanied us during the dive. She was patient with our laments as we were complaining about the heat on land in our full body suits, the fact we had to climb over a dike and push cows aside to reach the water, the fact that we had difficulty to descent during our first dive, the fact I was clumsy about putting all my gear on. And now thanks to her I have amazing photos to show for this dive, as a comparison without her photos this posts would’ve been filled with these:

Conclusion

I’m sure no one will book a trip to the Netherlands to go diving, so I’m also sure no one is cancelling a trip after reading my post. If you did book a trip to go diving, and you’re thinking of clicking cancel: don’t. At times this post might come across as negative, that’s because it wasn’t the best experience of my life. I like to be honest in my posts, diving in the Netherlands was physically draining, and you don’t get much in return either because the water is murky and dark. It was an experience nevertheless. I simply love being under water – it’s the stuff above water I don’t like – and when I look back at the photos made by Sandra, I’m happy we did this.

I can’t travel all the time, because of my full-time job so to be able to dive in The Netherlands is a great way to keep up to par with diving skills and even learn some new ones. My dive buddy and I are already planning one more Dutch diving trip for this year, so that goes to show how bad it really was 😉