Derek’s Dive Domain

Date: Wednesday 3/5/06

Location: Stoney Cove

Buddy: Chas49 (YD)

Max Depth: 6.2 Metres

Dive Time: Dive 51: 33 minutes   Dive 52: 31 minutes

Water Temp: A balmy 10′C

Total Dive Time Logged to Date: 30:56

Its a Wednesday night and its the right week for Stoney Cove to be open in the evening, so myself and Charles arranged to do a couple of shallow dives to do some drills and tweaks and generally become better acqaunted as buddies and with our kit.  Turning up at the Stoney car park bang on half past five, Charles was already there, so I parked up and got my tanked filled.

Having made a list of the drills that we wanted to practice, we kitted up and dropped in from the jetty and went down to the bottom at 5 metres after moving away from the entry area.  First up, mask removal.  Charles went first and after completing the drill and successfully clearing, the mask promptly filled up again, so after a couple of abortive attempts to fix, we surfaced so he could resolve the problem.   Just proves the point that the practice is always handy, I guess.  Back down and my turn, and I completed that OK.  My mask always fills up very slowly, due to my beard, so I get plenty of mask clearing practice during all my dives but the removal and refit practice was good.

Next up was lost regulator.  Charles was having a bad day in the office, because as soon as he chucked his reg away, it promptly freeflowed, easily resolved though, and we both completed the drill without incident.  Finally sharing air, which is a drill I hadn’t actually done in the water in years, so it was very handy to do this one again, although these days you just switch to the buddies octopus (or donation of choice), rather than sharing the one regulator.

Drills over for now, we proceeded to spend a nice 15 minutes or so just bimbling on the ledge, looking at the fish which were out in force.

I was using my computer for the first time, having always dived with the old faithful D-Timer in the past.  The M1 must be very carutious with its ascents, as it recorded a SLOW error in coming up from under 4 metres.  The D-Timer showed nothing of the sort, as I was carrying it in my BCD pocket to use as a comparison.  Thats going to make me work harder on my ascents in the future, which will probably be a good thing!

Question to self at this point: If computers are a little more sensitive, and you raise your arm quickly in a shallow ascent, ie make the computer ascend faster than you are, is that enough to trigger a warning ?

After about an hour out for coffee etc, we dropped back in to use up the remaining air in our cylinders and spent another pleasant half an hour or so bimbling about.  Had a good look at the APC which I’ve never spent much time looking at before, and opened up the side pod doors to find fish in there, I guess it makes a nice home for them to sleep in.  This time on the ascent there were no messages on either computer, after coming up from roughly the same spot, but being very slow about it. 

All in all, I found it a very useful night’s diving, as I learnt some more about kit, drills etc, as well as getting a nice bimble in.  Must do this sort of thing more often, as it was improving my bouyancy, as you tend to have to work harder at shallower depths to keep it right.