Het Diepe
How it works Before you come Terms & prices
Adults only
An adult swimmer in a blue cap and goggles standing in a pool, smiling.
Nobody is watching

HetDiepe

Swimminglessonsforgrown-ups✳ Swimminglessonsforgrown-ups✳ Swimminglessonsforgrown-ups✳

How we do it

A pair of swimming goggles lying on the tiled edge of a pool.

Shallow first

Six weeks in water you can stand up in, with both feet flat and your shoulders dry. Nobody moves along the pool until they say so themselves.

Coiled blue, red and yellow lane ropes hanging against a wall.

Eight at a time

Eight adults, all of whom also cannot swim. The gallery is shut on Tuesday evenings and the blinds on the corridor window are down.

A float drifting on the surface of a pool in bright light.

Face last

Floating, then moving, then putting your face in. That order, never the other one. Most of the fear lives in the last step and it can wait.

The blue tiled floor of a pool seen through clear water.

Twelve weeks

Most people float in three weeks, move in six and cross the pool in twelve. Some need two terms. Roughly one in five does, and it says nothing about them.

What we
will not do

No whistles
no counting

No deep end
until you ask

No children
in the water

A swimmer moving underwater beneath a line of floats.
First evening free
A swimmer mid-stroke with both arms out of the water.

How it
works

What it costs

  • € 165 for a term of twelve evenings, entry included
  • The first evening is free and you can leave at the break
  • Paid in two halves if that helps; ask, it is not a form

Getting in the water

  • Tuesdays, 20:45 to 21:30, from 7 January
  • The small pool, 1.20 m throughout, water at 30°C
  • Two teachers in the water, not on the side
Ask about the free evening
An indoor swimming pool with marked lanes, empty, under a row of high windows.

Terms

A swimmer seen from below, moving through clear blue water.

Term one — standing up

€ 165 · twelve evenings

Getting used to the water, putting your feet down on purpose, floating on your back. Nothing deeper than 1.20 m happens in this term.

Ask about this term
A lane rope and a steel ladder at the edge of a blue pool.
Most
people

Term two — moving

€ 165 · twelve evenings

Breaststroke legs, then arms, then both at once, which is the week everybody swears. By the end most people cross the small pool.

Ask about this term
A swimmer in an orange cap doing front crawl in a marked lane.
Your
choice

Term three — the big pool

€ 180 · twelve evenings

The 25-metre pool, water over your head, and getting out at the deep end. Optional, and about half the group takes it in the same year.

Ask about this term

Who comes

Two women in swimming caps and goggles standing together in a pool, laughing.
I was fifty-eight and I had spent thirty years saying I did not like the beach. The thing nobody told me is that the first evening is mostly standing in the shallow end talking, and that seven other people were as frightened as I was.

A swimmer from the Tuesday group, second term

Sunlight moving across the blue tiled floor of a pool. Close view of pool water with dark lane markings under the surface. An indoor pool with lane ropes and a blue-painted roof structure above it.

Before the
first evening

What to bring
A swimming costume you can move in and a towel. No goggles for the first three weeks — you will not be putting your face in, and they give you something to fiddle with.
The changing rooms
Two single cabins are kept free for our group and the doors lock. If you would rather arrive changed, that is fine and nobody will mention it.
If you panic
Stand up. The water is 1.20 m everywhere in that pool and both teachers are in it with you. Every group has at least one evening where somebody sits out, and it is not a setback.
Missing evenings
No refund for a single evening and no catch-up lesson. Miss more than four and we will suggest you start the term again, at half price.
Getting in
Lift to the pool level, a sloped entry into the small pool with a rail on both sides, and a hoist that we can have out if you tell us beforehand.
What we keep
A name, a phone number and whether you have a condition we should know about, on one sheet in a locked drawer. It is shredded at the end of the term. No photographs are taken in the hall, by us or by anyone else.
A woman swimming underwater with her arms stretched forward.

Just ask

HetDiepe

How we do it How it works Terms Before you come

Het Diepe is a fictional example. The pool, the times and the prices do not exist. Photographs are stock images and do not show this pool.