Derek’s Dive Domain

I haven’t posted much on here recently, so this is a quick catch up post…

 Diving:

18th February @ Stoney Cove

 Two quick bimbles with Charles Rogers from YD.  The first dive we went down the road, around the cairn and the coach, before coming up the wall and plodding around the ledge.  The second dive we did the Stanegarth and the newly repositioned APC before coming back up.  Boy were these cold dives, despite me using the new Northern Diver thermalskin layer underneath my undersuit.  I’m beginning to wonder whether these winter dives are worth it…. but then I remember that its better than working or sitting around bored

Dive 1 (122) 21 metres max depth, total dive time 33 mins

Dive 2 (123) 20.4 metres max depth, total dive time 32 mins

Water temp 7′C - I’ve dived in colder, but my old suit was a lot thicker!

25th February @ Stoney Cove

This was the Sunday of the Freeze Your Bits gig, and we nearly did.  I was taking part in Mark Powell’s skills workshop day, and it was a really good day, and I got to practice a few things, and come away with a few more ideas of things to practice and work on.  The first dive was general buoyancy practice, and also a little look at finning techniques, as I would quite like to learn to frog kick, as I am sure it could prove very useful in the future sometime, as I know I can be a bottom stirrer with my big heavy ND jetfins sometimes :(  The second dive was doing ascents, deco stops and stuff life midwater deployment of DSMB’s etc.  I have never done this before, so it was quite useful to do one and it worked pretty well.  I surprised myself actually…  
Two very useful dives, and the humour in the briefings was typical YD stuff.  God I love it really

Dive 1 (124)  Max depth 5.6 metres, total dive time 25 mins

Dive 2 (125)  Max depth 10.0 metres, total dive time 28 mins

 3rd March @ Stoney Cove

 Another couple of practice dives with Alex, who is a rebreather dive on an inspo.  I had never dived with a rebreather diver before, so it was quite a good experience to get used to not having any bubbles from my buddy to keep my eye on, and also good to experience a walkthrough of a ccr kit, in case I ever have to deal with anything.  Two chilly, but copeable dives of about 40 minutes, spent simply holding ascent positions, and trying to hold set depths for 3 and 5 minutes.  Some success, but some failure too.  I wouldn’t really want to see the profile of these two dives printed out, to be honest it might scare me!  But all practice is good practice.  I definitely need to work on these skills and also putting my DSMB up on more dives….

 Dive 1 (126)  max depth 22.3 metres, total dive time 41 mins

Dive 2 (127)  max depth 20.6 metres, total dive time 40 mins

And that is basically the diving brought up to date… LIDS report to follow sometime!