Scuba Escape Liverpool

Scuba Escape is the world's first official scuba escape experience with locations at Vivian Quarry in Wales and Princes Docks in Liverpool.  Day 1 done of our Northern Weekender at Capernwray, the group split on Sunday, some heading home, others remaining at Capernwray, while a group headed into Liverpool to try out this unique experience!

Our Scubanuts escape team comprised of Darren Walls, Eddy Bennett, Karl Inger, Kat McBirney, Liane Kynaston and myself, Sam Strand.  We travelled south from Capernwray, for about an hour to Princes Docks to meet up with Leanne Clowes and Clare Dutton, joint owners and creators of the worlds first scuba based escape rooms. Once kit was sorted, we headed inside for our briefing.  Scuba Escape offers a number of games and PADI specialities.  Our game of choice was ‘Money Heist’.  In brief, a local gang headed up by the infamous Pablo were caught robbing £1,000,000 from a nearby bank. Ahead of a police shoot out, in which his life of crime finally caught up with him (R.I.P. brother) our king of heists split the loot across 12 black bags and launched them at random into the docks. Police divers were on the way, so time was of the essence if we wanted to profit from Pablos final heist.

Whilst also being fun, the game offered a great opportunity to practice staple skills such as navigation, buddy skills and buoyancy control, given that most of the site has a maximum depth of 3m with a max of 7m. It also offered the opportunity to use those less often utilised skills such as search patterns and lifting techniques using appropriate knots and lift bags. One rule of the game, was that correct knots must be used, so unfortunately Eddy’s approach of “If you can’t tie knots, tie lots” wasn’t going to cut it on this occasion. Any broken rules came with pricey penalties, so instead we had to channel Alison and her rabbit coming out of its hole, round the tree and back down its hole…  ​Scubanuts were the first team to take on this game at the Docks. We had 15 minutes to plan, 45 minutes for our first dive and a 30 minute break followed by a further 60 minutes in the water to find and recover as much of the money as possible.

  We managed to locate six bags of discarded loot amongst various other objects. The award for most ‘interesting’ find has to go to Karl.  You will need to ask him directly what his own personal loot was as it’s not really appropriate for public consumption….    With the police divers hot on our trial, we brought the last two loot bags to the pontoon, donned our balaclavas to avoid detection by CCTV (bribing security to keep our identities secret would have cost us £5,000 per head) and piled into the back of our getaway van.  Once in the van, a slight plot twist was revealed. Pablo had in fact split the money across 8 bags. The remaining 4 bags were decoys. Much to our disappointment, we’d actually managed to find three of these! However, we did locate the two largest denominations of the stash which contained £300,000 and £100,000. The final bag contained £15,000 bringing our total to £415,000. Not bad for a days diving!
Check out Scuba Escape website for more details on how you can sample this unique and fun experience!