Hi

I'm having a few problems finding places to dive / people to dive with.  I
thought I had it about sorted now, but its all gone horribly wrong (my local
club seems to be impossible to contact!) and I don't really know how i'm
going to get some diving in.  I'm away from my normal club, the club I
learnt with, and am now in the North East (near Durham) and need somewhere
to go.  What do people usually do to get somewhere to dive and someone to
dive with.  Problem is, i'll be diving in my new drysuit for the first time,
so i'm not sure whether anyone would want to buddy with me until i'm sure
about my weighting and i'm comfortable with the new bouyancy.  Are divers
generally a forgiving bunch?  I really don't want to get buddied with
someone who doesn't want to waste half his day waiting for me - its not fair
on them apart from anything else.  Also, I only recently finished BSAC
Sports Diver so haven't done any of the depth progression stuff yet - I can
only really go deeper than about 25m with an instructor, for the first
couple of times anyway.
All this pointed me to joining my local club, trying the drysuit in the
pool, and then doing some diving with them, even if its just following
someone around on their training a couple of times to get me back to being
comfortable in a new suit.  I thought this would be fine, but I haven't been
able to get in contact with my local club, and i'm not sure about joining a
club much further away - it'd be nearly 30-45 minutes drive to a different
club, which would probably mean I don't go to regular club meetings and so
don't really get as involved in the club as i'd like to - just going along
for the occasional diving.
The other problem is that I tend to work over the weekend, so ideally need
to have weekday diving or i'll never be able to get enough time off to do
much at all.

Does anyone have any ideas at all?  Is anyone here from Bishop Auckland Sub
Aqua Club by any chance, who I could talk to about joining that (my local
club) since i've had nothing from any of the three useful-looking e-mail
addresses I found on their website.

I spent all my money on equipment, am looking forward to getting in the
water, and now I've hit a blank about how to do it!  :o(

Help!!!  :o(

David