Every now and then I have the pleasure of meeting someone who stands out from the normal diving crowd – in a good way. As it happened, Sue Mitchell, one of the first to welcome me to Reading BSAC, is such a person. She was very warm and friendly, also sensed a no-nonsense air about her. She seemed to be either on most of Reading BSAC’s trips, or running them. And on my first Reading club trips I also learned that being on one of Sue’s trips usually meant not having to pack my own lunch, as she would often turn up with the most excellent homemade sausage rolls.
There’s much more to Sue than just being an excellent cook, although I could dedicate an entire column just to her sausage rolls and roasts. Sue is 68 years young, and learned to dive in 1982. When she started, she and her husband shared a membrane drysuit by fitting wrist seals on the legs and wearing wetsuit boots to accommodate their different foot sizes. In her early diving days, Sue tells me that there was a lot of diving out of Swanage, predominantly on the Kyarra shipwreck.
She’s now, at the time of writing, still logging her dives after 3,742 of them; she has dived all around the UK and the world, with her favourite dives being the reefs off Cork, Ireland. Outside of the standard BSAC courses, she’s also done Seasearch and Nautical Archaeological courses, which means being both a squidge and a rust lover. She’ll dive anything.
Life isn’t always easy and a low point was in 2005, when Sue survived breast cancer; as a typical diving addict, she says that six months of no diving was a real trial (no mention of everything else that goes on in beating cancer), but she was back in the water by Easter 2006. There were also times when fortune favoured her… She was supposed to be in Thailand when the Boxing Day Tsunami hit in 2004, but had to cancel her flights because she broke her coccyx after falling out of her shoes while dressed as Dame Edna Everidge. Fate can be a fickle mistress.
Sue served various diving clubs as Diving Officer and Training Officer. She was voted one of BSAC’s volunteers of the year in 2011 and has for many decades faithfully served as instructor to both Reading and Reading University Clubs. She became and instructor in 1987 in order to help Reading University Club, where she was doing BEd as a mature student at the time.
The then Diving Officer of Reading inadvisably told Sue she couldn’t become and Advanced Instructor “because you’re a girl” and therefore wouldn’t recommend her to BSAC (a recommendation being a requirement back then). The BSAC Regional Coach at the time, Jane Maddocks, told her she didn’t need his permission and recommended Sue herself, and so in 1989 she became an Advanced Instructor.
Sue may have retired from her microbiology job in the NHS but she is still diving – a lot! She says it keeps her going and keeps her young at heart. Sue, may you continue to dive for many years, and may you also continue making your sausage rolls.
