BY Bermuda Sun,

A group of scuba enthusiasts from Bermuda travelled to Turks and Caicos last week to experience some of the world's best diving.

The group, from Triangle Diving, got up close and personal with sharks, rays and moray eels on a week-long trip to the Caribbean diving Mecca.

The nine divers, part of a sports and social club that runs out of the Grotto Bay company, also experienced Turks' notorious walls -dizzying drop offs - were the depth suddenly plunges from 60 to 2,000 feet.

Graham Maddocks, who runs the club, said it was the first overseas trip they had been on.

The club started as a few like-minded individuals getting together every so often for a beer and some nachos at the Swizzle Inn to talk about diving. But it developed into fully-fledged social club with monthly meetings, night dives, curry nights and beach barbecues.

The Turks trip was the first of what Mr. Maddocks hopes will become regular overseas jaunts to the world's best dive sites.

He said: "The diving was completely different to what we have here, which is what we wanted.

"When you're comparing world class dive-destinations it's like comparing a Ferrari and a Jaguar. They're both awesome, just for different reasons," he said. "Turks is basically all wall-diving. If you've never done it before, it's such a neat thing because you're on this flat plateau and it suddenly disappears, dropping to about 2,000 feet. It gives you an amazing feeling of vertigo."

The shelves where these plateaus drop from the shallow seas to the deep ocean are teeming with life.

Galapagos sharks, eagle rays and dolphins are drawn in by the currents, which sweep nutrients from the open ocean.

"Another thing they have is the Nassau Grouper," Mr. Maddocks said. "There used to be tons of them around Bermuda but they were wiped out by the fish pots and never came back."

The nine divers - Mr. Maddocks, Triangle instructor Graham Christmas, Tessa Robins, Stephen Bailey Russell Whayman, Simon and Sarah Pretty, Stefan Harold, and Ken Vickers - hired a dive boat and its staff for the week.

They dove twice a day and spent the rest of the time sight-seeing and relaxing.

Mr. Maddocks added: "We spend so much time together as a club anyway, we are all good friends. I couldn't think of a better group of people to experience this with. They are all keen, enthusiastic divers. Nobody complained about anything except the beer running out."

Future trips are planned to the Cayman and the Red Sea. But for now, Mr. Maddocks is concentrating on the up coming season in Bermuda. He wants to expand the club and organize more diving trips and social events on the island.

"One thing you do realize when you go away from Bermuda is just how good the diving is here," he said.

"Turks was phenomenal but they didn't have the amount of healthy reef, the swim-throughs or the wrecks that we have here.

"We are looking at expanding the club to offer more opportunities for our members to dive different sites around the island - places that we don't always take the tourists.

"We don't always appreciate what we have in Bermuda. We're trying to shake this reputation that diving is for the foolhardy and the crazy. It's not really like that.

"It can be as sedated or as complicated as you want it to be."

Interested in joining a dive club? Triangle Diving membership is $850 for the year if you join before the end of April, $900 afterwards. For more information call 799-3536 or visit info@trianglediving.com.

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