Derek’s Dive Domain

Sunday comes around and after diving at Guildenburgh the day before, I had managed to arrange a dive with Callum (Calski) at short notice, so we met up at Stoney Cove at about 9.00 and both managed to get into the bottom car park fortunately, so that was a good start.  These were to be just regular bimbly dives (so we thought) and we were being joined by Leigh (Yippeediver)

After the traditional slow start, we all got kitted up and dropped into the water at about 10.30 and went over to the drop off and down to 20 metres.  Found the anchor chain, which surprised me in the reduced viz, and went on out to the Stanegarth.  Pootled around the Stanegarth for a few minutes, and then Callum indicated he was down to 100 bar (ish, he uses psi!), so we took off for the Wessex in order to do out regular ascent up the wall there.  Missed it in the gloom and ended up at the quarry wall over by the second blockhouse (told you it was reduced viz - thats my excuse anyway!)

The dive ended up a bit of a mess, as we had pushed it from the Stanegarth to the wall, and Leigh had been fighting to keep up, and let us know underwater in no uncertain terms, quite rightly so, so after surfacing and having a chat about things, we decided that the second dive would be a proper bimble all around the ledge, with Leigh leading, and taking the dive at whatever pace he fancied.  This worked really well as it was a much more relaxed dive with both Callum and myself stopping to look at stuff more often rather than fighting in a “must get over here quick” stylee.  Kudos to Leigh for being willing to do another dive after such a crappy first one for him.

What came out of the days diving ?  I relearnt that diving is meant to be relaxing, and for the first time since restarting diving, really enjoyed a very slow dive, in a style that I thought had disappeared from sport diving.  Since I have gotten back diving again everything has seemed to be done much more faster than I remembered, so it was great to find out that there are still dives like this one to be had.  Cheers Leigh!

Had a good social drink and chat in the bar as per usual and then it was on our merry ways home

Dive Data:

Dive 1 (56) 21.2 metres total dive time 27 minutes

Dive 2 (57) 7.3 metres, total dive time 43 minutes