After more than 33 years of diving I reached the point where I decided to do my last dive. Not because of health reasons but just because after all these years I didn't like diving as much as I did in the past so I dove less and less frequently.
In 1991 during a vacation in Aruba I decided to start diving. I contacted a dive organisation to get my Padi Open Water certification. I liked diving so much that I decided to continue with the Padi Advanced Open water certification. That was all during a three week vacation in Aruba.
Back in The Netherlands I contacted a Padi diving organisation because I wanted to dive in The Netherlands too. Of course a completely different environment compared to where I started diving. With much lower water temperatures and far less visibility. But diving is diving. The most dificult adaptation was the switch from seawater in Aruba to fresh water in The Netherlands. I had no idea how much weight I would need to get under water. Not only because of the difference of fresh water versus sea water but also because of the far thicker websuit. I had to come back to the shore often to get more weights. In the end I decided to dive under but in that upside-down position I lost some of the weights that I had put loose in my pockets. So once again back to the shore. Finally I was able to get and stay under water. Not much time left for diving during that session but at least I had a valuable experience.
I did a lot of dives in The Netherlands and liked it. And I continued with specialty courses. Especially Navigation was very valuable in The Netherlands because of the low visibility. So the compass was your friend under water. Direction and timing were the key ingredients to find your way back to the shore.
I did dives in the Grevelingen (brackish water), the Oosterschelde and Westerschelde and even some wreck diving in the North Sea and of course also dives in fresh water (lakes). I took a lot of pictures in that time. Especially the Anenomes in the Oosterschelde were beautiful.
In 1994 my wife and I moved to Curaçao. From then on I did only warm water dives. And only in sea water because the Dutch Caribbean islands don't have fresh water lakes. Almost from the beginning I had Rob Buzink as my buddy. In the beginning a lot of diving in a larger group but later more and more just the two of us.
Mid 2006 I joined the team that did archaeological dives on the wrecks of The Mediator and The Alphen in the Anna bay. Every weekend we dove on these wrecks, mainly on the Mediator and occasionally on the remnants of The Alphen. In the next couple of years I took hundreds of pictures of the wreck of The Mediator. I also tried to make panoramic pictures to get a better view of the wreck.
During my dives on the Mediator I came in contact with Karel Boon. He was and is the owner of the dive organisation Trunkdivers. With him I continued my formal dive education which in the end resulted in becoming a Open Water Dive instructor in 2008. I joined Trunkdivers; at that time located at Landhuis Daniel. From the start of Kokomo Beach at Vaersenbaai the dive school moved to Vaersenbaai where it is still located. We did a lot of diving on all shore diving sites in Curaçao which resulted in the joint publication by Karel and me of The Curaçao Diving Guide.
I was part of Trunkdivers till the end of 2013 when I decided to start organizing weekly hikes. From that time on I purely recreational dives.
And now the time has come to also end the recreational dives. I decided to let my DAN-insurance expire in July 2024. Just before that I did one last dive on the wreck of The Superior Producer. My buddy during that dive, Reinier Voors, recorded that dive with his GoPro. I created a shorter video of this recording as a memory of my last dive. It is shown here.