Cochrane truly has some amazing features, the mountains, the paths, and… the scuba diving?

Today, Lauren and I took the 91.5FM CochraneNow Morning Show into the SLS Centre with Generation Wave Scuba to learn the first steps of scuba and even spent over an hour under the water of the Jayman BUILT Aquatic Centre.

We got into the pool with PADI Instructor Noëlle McCusker and she says people are always surprised when they learn they can do this so close to home. “People ask me, where's the water?” she laughs. “We have wonderful facilities like the SLS center and we have beautiful mountains with lakes and we actually have Harmony Lake just outside Cochrane here, which we use for so many different training dives. They've been wonderful to work with.”

We started by suiting up with the full meal deal, a wet suit, tank, mask and fins (Important note* divers don’t call them goggles and flippers).

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“We are going to learn some basic dive skills,” Noëlle told us. “We're going to learn some mask skills, some regulator skills, how to control our buoyancy underwater, and most importantly, we're going to have some fun.”

I was surprised how quickly we picked up the basics and in less than 20 minutes we were fully submerged and breathing underwater. 

After countless hours of chasing my kids through the pools at the SLS, it was a little jarring now sitting on the bottom of the deep end but also shocking how quickly your mind accepts that you can now breathe underwater.

Throughout our two-hour trial, we went from learning the basics to doing underwater flips and swimming through hula hoops.

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To say I didn’t spend hours afterwards Googling “Where are the best scuba locations” would be a lie.

Huge thanks to Noëlle, Ken and the whole team with Generation Wave Scuba for giving us an experience I would never expect to find in town.

-Eric 🤿

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