Derek’s Dive Domain

Bloody Typical
Where my dives went this weekend :

Last summer, Lou told me I needed to get more salt in my diet, so I made an effort to put some money aside, and to do a few less dives at Stoney to try this idea out I sometimes wonder why I listened
Last weekend was supposed to be a dive fest, doing two dives out of Littlehampton on the Northcoates gig on the Saturday and 2 dives out of Gosport on the Sunday after grabbing a space on TerryH’s SUCS gig out to U1195 just off the Isle of Wight.
Got the message that the Saturday’s diving was off, so instead of driving down at silly o’clock AM, I got up nice and leisurely and drove down to the Littlehampton area, where I went to visit a friend who lives just up the road from Selsey.
Being curious and having never seen Selsey before, I decided to head down and have a look. Nice calm sea, and lots of sunshine (a little microclimate by the looks of it). Spoke to some divers who had just got back on a Rib, and they were saying they had had a lovely dive. Hmph.
Watched a very scary dive taking place. A group of four divers were going in from the slipway area at Selsey, and doing a shore dive amongst the moored boats there. One diver looked to be a newbie, possibly on an early open water dive. The rest were obviously experienced. They went in without a SMB, which I thought was a little odd near the slipway, and I was proved right, when one diver surfaced without a buddy, stayed on the surface for a few minutes, then popped down again. The space where his head had been was driven straight over about a minute later by a Rib returning to the slip. It looked like scary stuff to me. This diver had obviously lost his buddy as he kept popping up in different places and then going down again. No sign of the buddy ever appearing. Eventually they both surfaced at the same time… about 300 yards apart! Anyway, enough of that, I now know of a couple of shore dives in the Selsey area to experiment with next time I am down that way.
I had failed to find a campsite, other than one which wanted 20 pounds for a one man tent, so I said bugger that and got a B&B and went out for a meal in the evening. Only to get a phone call from TerryH to say, guess what, Sunday’s diving is off too. “Bother” says I.
So stayed overnight, and came back up yesterday 180 miles, 5 hours, torrential rain the whole way with flooding on the roads.
Not a good weekend… then I come back on here and find out that the rest of the country appears to have been diving.
I would however just like to claim the 5th, and say that Mattbin *was* down to be on both lots of diving this weekend, so I guess there is the reason!
2007 sea diving: 4.5 days lost out of 8 booked, or 8 dives lost out of 15 booked.
I guess there is always next time.