A few weeks ago I went with Sven to visit Østerbro-based CMAS diving club, Aquarius. We have been looking for a club to join for quite a while - as opposed to diving with the commercial based dive centres - dive shops, of which there is quite a few around the city.
The advantage of diving with a commercial diving centre is that you get what you pay for: you come there and pay and they take you diving.
However gas fills are expensive, if you don't bring a buddy you get paired with somebody random - the insta-buddy, whose skill level is unknown to you, and might even ben non-existing!, and after the dive it's up to yourself to bring all the wet equipment back home (using public transportation) to the 25 sqm apartment on the 10th floor (and no elevator) and hang it to dry over doors and chairs and on the carpet in the living room.
Diving with a dive club addresses all of these issues: gas fills are cheap - both nitrox and trimix, because the club is non profit, you know with whom you are diving, because it's the same people on all the trips, and the same people with whom you swim laps with in the pool every Tuesday, and you know their skill level more or less: at least they are not so dangerous to themselves and their buddies that they have managed to get themself kicked out of the club so far, and after the dive you can hang all the equipment to dry in the dive club - and leave it there until next time you go diving!! What a joy!
Aquarius has several boats, a repair shop for equipment, a brand new filling station, plenty of space for storage of gear and tanks, a bar (for hanging out after diving) and what seems to me lots of jolly people who are more or less my own age. So after paying up (400 DKK initial fee to join, 350 DKK every three months), I am now for the first time in my diving career a club member!
Aquarius is a CMAS club, which means that they conduct their training according to the CMAS program. But since I do my training elsewhere, it doesn't really cause any problems: I can choose to dive without snorkel and without the buddy-line if I want to on non-training dives - which is the kind of dives I will be doing with Aquarius.
Yesterday we went to the pool at Vesterbro Svømmehal where a CMAS 2* class is being conducted - I brought swim trunks only, and managed to do 50 (or so, I lost count) 25 meter laps. GUE has a 275 meter in 14 minutes requirement, Aquarius themselves have a 500 meter no time limit requirement - I comply fine with both of them. And swimming is a nice workout on top of that.