Sunday 11th November 2007 saw the first ever Doing It excursion to Wastwater in the Lake District. Leaving Cannock at 5:30am, in torrential rain and buffeted by a gale, thing's looked far from promising. Indeed, most of the Doing It divers and all of the Tech guys decided against it. But turning off the M6 at Junction 36, the rain died away, the wind dropped off and the sun came up over a glorious view of the Lake District... things were looking up!

After two-and-a-half more hours of driving on A-roads, my dodgy directions just said “turn right after the left for Seascale and look for the lake,” so in the spirit of all great explorers I headed into the unknown and “drove about a bit”. When I saw this I knew I was on the right track. That must be it... “THE LAKE!”. Unfortunately, the sign was also pointing at the only rain-cloud in the entire blue sky... you guessed it, the only place it was raining on was our dive-site and nowhere else in Cumbria! It looked forbidding.

But the brave souls who had turned up, kitted up and were rewarded with a truly gorgeous view as the sun came out. This was probably the most beautiful place I had ever dived – indeed, it's “Britain's favourite view”.

If you don't know the area, it's notoriously difficult to identify the right entry point for “The Pinnacles” - the signature dive at this site. We picked an entry point and decided to do two dives, one in each direction, to guarantee finding the wall and pinnacles on at least one dive. The rest of the dive brief was more ominous... Wastwater is famous for a number of things. First, it's England's deepest lake at 79 metres. Second, according to the BBC's “Ultimate Wild Water” it's Britain's coldest (brrrr!). Third, it's most famous for the discovery (by pleasure divers) of a murder victim – the so-called "lady in the lake".

All briefed up, we waded in to the surprisingly choppy water and headed down the slope looking for 15m. Underwater, the visibility was around 10m, not the 20m you can get here, but the wind was causing some waves and disturbing the silt in the shallows. The water has a greenish tinge and with no life in the lake and a fine white silt smoothing the curves of the bottom it's like floating above an eerie moonscape. But we'd chosen the wrong direction for our first dive and didn't find the blue guide-rope for The Pinnacles. In fact, all we did find was this beer can.

In such a featureless terrain it was hard to find the exit point underwater so we finished with a bit of a surface swim against the wind. Unfortunately, due to staff illness we had to can the second dive, so we never did find those pinnacles... but we'll be back next year - this would be a great place to bring a van-load of scooters and get that DPV specialty while looking for the pinnacles (and maybe some bodies).