Derek’s Dive Domain

OK, so its Thursday night, 10.30 PM and I’ve just had a phone call from a freind letting me know that our camping weekend on the motorbikes is off. The weather forecast is superb, so I cannot let the weekend go to waste completely, so I decide to go out on the bike on Sunday, and try and arrange a dive somewhere, anywhere for Saturday.

Sent a couple of PM’s out on YD at very late notice, and Spacehopper comes to the rescue, saying he fancies a wet, so we arrange to meet at Stoney on Saturday morning. We duly arrive at the Cove, I got there early to get a bottom car park space, and Gareth arrives about an hour or so later after a longer drive and we bring his kit down to my car. Then we go and look at the water…. oh bother, said Pooh

It looks incredibly green, and we can’t even see the bottom at the quayside. Hmmm, perhaps our planned dives aren’t such a good idea we think, so we decide to can the original plan, and use the day as a chance to get acquainted with some new kit, and get a little experience with diving in poor viz.

No sooner have we started kitting up but I hear a diver letting out a large explosion of breath in the water (Thats the only way I can describe it - sort of like an explosion of relief). He does this a couple of times, and I begin to wonder whats going on. So we both walk down to the bus stop, as thats the nearest point to where the diver is, and check on him. It turns out that he was an Open Water student on his first actual open water dive, and he had “had a moment” at the cockpit and surfaced quickly. I know the cockpit is only in a maximum of 6-7 metres at the rear and 5 at the front which is where the students pronably were, so after checking that the guy was fine, and taking a couple of bits of kit from him, we see some divers surfacing in the rough area of the cockpit. Having reunited the diver with his instructor and fellow students we went back up to the car to finish kitting up. (As a footnote to this, I am surprised that no other divers on the quayside took any interest or checked this diver out, as he was clearly distressed on the surface, and especially after the incident the week before I would have thought more people might be reacting. It wasn’t an incident that required any intervention from the Stoney staff, I was just surprised at the lack of response from divers much nearer than we were, thats all)

Anyway, we kit up, and drop in at the slipway, and we are immediately surrounded by plankton and greenness. Maximum visibility was about 2 metres. We head out and about around the ledge for 40 minutes. I am wearing my Pony for the first time after finally getting it rigged up onto my kit, and I have had to guesstimate the weight to lose and also the balancing and moving around of some of the weight on my belt to counterbalance the pony on the side of my main tank. Its working quite well, although I know I can lose a bit more weight yet.

Finally, it happens, we get to the cockpit ourselves, and immediately become separated. Despite having checked on Gareth’s location literally two fin strokes earlier, we’ve drifted apart and its time to sort ourselves out. I give it a few seconds holding my position, before doing a circuit of the cockpit to see if he has gone the wrong side of the nose. After completing a full circuit, I’ve not seen hide nor hair of any divers, so I wait another half a minute of so, and then make a nice slow ascent to the surface. Within a few seconds Gareth has surfaced literally only about 5 metres from me, and we reunite. Its good when a drill works as it should, we had decided on what plan to use should we get separated, and it worked well when it was needed, neither of us staying down continuing to get worried etc. It turned out that we had indeed gone one either side of the nose of the cockpit and normally you would be able to see each other through the windows, but not in this viz. I now have this mental image of us both circling the cockpit following each other around but never seeing each other

Anyway, we decide thats enough for one dive, and head over to the steps and out. We have a nice long surface interval drinking up the sun, and relaxing, before kitting up again for dive two. This time I am going in with 145 bar in my cylinder, so it is a good opportunity to lose some more weight from the belt and try it out with the cylinder being more bouyant. I remove about a kilo, and get down no problems. We have another 35 minutes bimbling around on the ledge, before deciding to practice sending blobs up, albeit from 5 metres. I’ve never worn a reel or blob before, and had borrowed a double ended boltsnap from Gareth to attach it to the bottom D ring on my BCD, which worked very well, as it was easy to detach when needed. I sent mine up, but messed it up completely, not surprising for a first attempt, so we surfaced, wound it back up and went down again for another go. This time it worked well, I didn’t let go too soon and it filled nicely. Interestingly as well, I had 70 bar in my cylinder and was still able to get down without too much bother, so I think I am nearing the right amount of weight for the new kit configuration.

Myself (left) and Gareth aka Spacehopper
We surface again, and head in. Two very worthwhile dives in the end, turning what could have been a very disappointing day into a decent one, I have now done two dives with the pony rig on, although I haven’t tried switching to it yet, and I’ve also deployed the blob successfully. More practice needed though, of course.

Dekit and off to the pub as usual for a pint of decojuice, and we are both now looking forward to the weekend in Plymouth at the end of the month.

Dive Data:

Dive 1 (78) Max Depth 6.2 metres, total dive time 41 minutes

Dive 2 (79) Max Depth 7.2 metres, total dive time 41 minutes.