These are the most frequent questions about SCUBA diving asked of us, and our answers to them.

In this country, there are schools with professional instructors, and amateur diving organisations of which the British Sub Aqua Club (BSAC) is the biggest. The amateur organisations are broken down into branches, which can have anything from ten to a couple of hundred members each. Each branch has its members who are also qualified instructors. They are volunteers with full-time jobs who give up their free time to instruct. Holborn SCUBA club is a branch of the BSAC, and has 50 members.

So what are the differences and which should you choose?

Training usually takes longer with a club, as it is usually done on one evening per week over successive weeks. A school will be more flexible about the times you can take lessons, and will often allow a course to be compressed into a short time, which - especially if you are in a rush before a holiday abroad - can be useful.

The club instructor wants to train people that will be club members long after their initial training, possibly becoming instructors themselves. They also want to produce divers they themselves would be happy to dive with, as the beginning of a relationship that could last many years. In fact all club members are usually happy to pass on the benefits of their experience to others (at great length sometimes) and so club membership is a continual learning experience. That is not to say that the quality of the training is better: school instructors in this country are usually very good and have a lot of teaching experience.

After you join a club you are entitled to training up to whatever level you desire as a right of your membership. If you follow the PADI way, you pay for a course to learn to dive in a basic manner, then you pay for extra courses as you progress.

After a school course finishes, there is limited contact between the trainee and the instructor, although some schools make laudable efforts to stay in touch with their pupils, and some PADI clubs have grown out of this. You are unlikely to find yourself diving with your instructor as a dive buddy years afterwards, but if you join a club to learn, this often happens. Most club members find that their club becomes a major part of their social life; numerous marriages have arisen within clubs, and a great many more lasting friendships.

Clubs go diving on weekends, usually between April to October, which means that you will learn to dive in British waters. You will learn to deal with some of the most challenging conditions for divers in the World - and also do some of the best dives.

In summary: if you want to make diving a major leisure occupation and become very good at it, then joining a club would be your best bet. If you intend only to dive occasionally in benign warm-water conditions, on holiday, then you may find that taking a professionaly taught course would suit you better; if that is your choice then one school with which Holborn club has strong links is City Divers who share our pool from time to time.

This is broken down into the cost to learn, and the cost of buying your own equipment.

Most clubs charge an initial one-off training fee, but will not charge for subsequent training, although there are nominal charges for some BSAC skill development courses. Clubs have to pay swimming pool rental and for equipment maintenance (many own their own boat). They therefore charge an annual membership fee, which in Greater London is usually in the region of £100-£150. This is usually set at a level to allow the club to pay its costs and put a little aside each year to replace essential items (like boats). In return for this members can use the pool on club nights for free, which means in most cases that if you are a regular swimmer anyway and can take advantage of this, membership pays for itself over the year. In the case of Holborn club the training fee and first years membership comes to a little over £300, but that does not have to be paid all at once.

If all you want is a basic qualification with which to dive abroad, the costs of a initial school course and a club course are not that different, and may be cheaper with a school. However if you want to progress, each further professionaly taught course costs more money, but a club offers further training for free. As an example, to reach the equivalent of a BSAC sports diver grade, you would probably pay an initial training fee to a club, plus one or two years worth of membership. This cost would vary from club to club, but let us round it upwards to £500. To reach the equivalent level via the PADI route you would require three courses: PADI Open Water, Advanced Open Water, and Rescue Diver. You may get a discounted Open Water course, sometimes for as little as £150, but the other two will cost at least £450, leaving training with a club as the cheaper option, but of course you will also have had to buy your own equipment by then too.

Most clubs have equipment that they loan to trainees for the duration of their pool training, and for their initial open water training dives. However, once training is complete this equipment will be needed for the next course, so if you want to continue diving you will need your own equipment. At the very least you will need a regulator, a buoyancy jacket of some kind, a suit - either dry or wet (cheaper but colder), a mask, fins, a torch, a weightbelt, and a dive timer or computer. Add a tank and you are looking at something between £800 and £1500 if you buy all of this new. This may seem a lot, but if you think about any adventurous sport, such as mountain biking, hang-gliding, sailing, ski-ing, or mountaineering, the set-up costs are comparable, and if you remember that your life depends on all of this stuff, which means it needs to be engineered to a very high standard, then it does not seem so much money. Put it another way: it's less than the cost of a 42-inch plasma screen TV, and I'd rather go diving than watch TV any day.

Because SCUBA equipment is well made, it lasts a long time, which means that there is nothing wrong with buying second-hand kit. Servicable secondhand equipment is always coming up for sale in diving clubs, and so you can save money that way.

Once you get the bug of course, the sky's the limit. The big decision point comes when you want to go deeper, and start wanting 'redundancy' in your equipment. This means that you buy another set of nearly everything - and take it all down with you. You now need a bigger car to carry all this stuff (I found I needed a bigger house too). And if you become interested in underwater photography, or trimix diving, or rebreathers, your initial kit budget will seem like small change!

The BSAC recognises training by other organisations and national clubs - see the table below. If you want a little bit more detail on this, look at the BSAC leaflet on alternative training (PDF)