Another Warm Water Dive - I could get used to this! July 12, 2006
Posted by wannabemermaid in : Life, The Universe And Everything , 1 comment so farThis is just going to be a quick catch up as I have been rather lazy and not updated my site in a while. Still I couldn’t move on without mentioning a rather spectacular couple of dives on the Zenobia!
I went out to Cyprus with my family on holiday for a week but by day 3 I had had enough of lounging on beaches and pottering in the sea - anyone who knows me will probably be suprised that I managed to stay still even that long! So I searched out our local dive centre (not quite such a treck as the one in Tenerife) and asked about diving the Zenobia - having realised from YD that it was something of a ‘must do’ in Cyprus. After spending some time explaining to my family just why it was worth quite so much money and utimately how it was my money anyway (it wouldn’t be a family holiday if everyone didn’t bicker after all!) I signed up for a trip the following day.
As ever with diving we had an early start. We drove up to Larnaca and joined about a dozen other people in lugging kit onto a big converted barge which took us out to the dive site. It was a nice base to dive from but apparently less than half full, I really wouldn’t want to have tried it at maximum capacity with divers and kit everywhere.
Unfortunately I had a rather nasty shock when I first jumped in and air started pouring out of my rented BC, I clearly hadn’t checked it well enough because when I manged to get to the boat and hang on I discovered that the connection between the jacket and hose was broken and would never hold air. Fortunately the boat had a spare BC so I rekitted with that and off we went.
Descending down the shotline was amazing as the wreck loomed out of the gloom as we moved towards it. We knelt on the side of the hull to adjust all our kit and aclimatise for a while and get used to the awesome size of the ship. Then we swam out over the deck, it’s incredible to see the lorries still strapped in, I think it was only then that the sheer size of the vessel really struck me. We swam slowly over the deck and around the stern then back along the other side. There were a whole multitude of fish over the wreck and all sorts of interesting windows to peer in. We moved along to the bow having a quick look through the hatch into the canteen and back over the lorry deck. By this stage I was starting to get a little chilly and air and no-deco time were both starting to get low so we headed back to the shot and ascended up that. At our 5m safety stop we could just see the dak shape of the ship below us - very cool!
We spent the surface interval lounging around on deck and trying to decide whether we were pleased or annoyed that the sun had gone in and discussing the dive. My buddy wanted to use his full face mask on the second dive so we had a quick run through of how that worked, how to remove it and out of air procedures. Our guide asked if we wanted to do a swim through and we both decided we’d like to try it.
Then it was time to get back in the water! As before we descended down the shotline and followed a similar route around the ship - it was still absolutely amazing. However it quickly became apparent that our guide was having prroblems with her BC inflate and was disconnecting and reconnecting it. She evenaully gave up and left it disconnected and used her drysuit for bouyancy, unfortunately that was rather leaky so she ended up making sure she stayed above the hull of the ship rather than off to the side and there was no chance of doing a swim through. So, slightly dissapointing but these things happen. We ended up by sitting on the side of the hull taking some pictures and having to shoo the swarms of fish out of the photos!
It later transpired that our guides BC had been automatically inflating itself which is why she had disconnected it. I wondered at that stage why she hadn’t then used the oral inflate on the jacket but in fairness it hadn’t occurred to me when we were actually under the water either.
I am not going to mention the dive school here because I think they were all lovely people but they seemed to be having a bit of an off-day with their kit and I hope it isn’t generally representative of their standard of maintainance. Despite this I had a great day and the food served on the boat on the way back was spectacular! Definately a trip where it is worth being first in the water so you are first out and halfway into your first serving of lunch before anyone else gets to it!
Just a couple of piccies - Thanks Martin for e-mailing them to me.
Me! over the hull Martin, my buddy Our guide swimming out to the bow
Warm Water Dive - First Find Your Dive Centre! April 20, 2006
Posted by wannabemermaid in : Life, The Universe And Everything , 1 comment so farI spent a week this month ‘demonstrating’ on a field trip to Tenerife, this mainly involved being enthusiastic about rocks at a group of undergraduates who were really more interested in almost anything else! Despite this I had a fabulous time, especially since I find it disturbingly easy to be enthusiastic about rocks, in fact, difficult not to be when I am living around a not quite inactive volcano! We were staying in Playa de Las Americas (urghh - wouldn’t reccommend it!) and I was midly entertained by wondering how many other people staying in the resort realised that the ‘hill’ that separates it from Los Christianos is actually a small volcanic cone!
So, how does the diving enter into this? Well they gave us all a half day on Saturday and whilst the students were working diligently back at the hotel I managed to cram a dive in! This was a little more tricky than I expected. The lady on reception directed me to a dive centre in Los Christianos, I was suprised that there wasn’t one closer but walked over there anyway. When I found them they told me that it not being peak season, they weren’t taking a boat out for a 3rd dive but could offer me a shore dive. I declined politely (too hot to be trudging round the sand in a wetsuit in my view and they admitted that there wasn’t much to see). The helpful dive centre (I wish I could remember their name) then called around for me to see if anyone did have a boat going out.
Success, a centre in Puerto Colon had a trip going at 3pm and they would book me on. It was now 2.15pm and Puerto Colon is at the other end of the resort, back through Los Christianos and Las Americas. I arrived, hot, slightly sunburnt and with a grazed knee having fallen over my own flip-flops, at 2.55pm. I then of course discovered that things were running on Canarian time and spent half an hour in a cafe drinking nice cold orange juice before returning to kit up!
My dive buddies turned out to be another university student and a UK dive instructor who spent much of his time at Stoney. Ironically we then went out in the boat back past Los Christianos to a small rocky reef the other side! To be honest, it wasn’t the best dive I have done in Tenerife but it was wonderful to be back in a wetsuit and be able to peer head down at something without me feet trying to drag me to the surface. It was shallow, starting at 4m and decsending to around 10m following the reef out to sea along it’s base. We saw a fair number of fish, wrasse and a couple of things that I couldn’t identify. We also saw sea spiders which i find fascinating but the highlight was a fin sticking up through the sand which we hovered and watched for a while and just after my buddies had given up on it and turned around, give a wriggle and revealed itself to be a large ray. I reisted the temptation to prod it and left it to lie in the sand in peace. It was still there when we came back past it. We came back to the anchor line and pootled around to a bit before one of my buddies decided that she was short of air and wanted to ascend. By then I was starting to feel just a little chilly and it seemed like a good idea to me.
We zipped back to the dive centre and got ourselves de-kitted. Fortunately one of my buddies was staying near to me and we shared a taxi back allowing me to saunter into the hotel just 5 minutes late for my ‘help the students’ session in the bar. Mind you, I hate to think what they thought I had been up to all afternoon when I came back in with that silly grin I get from diving 
I will put some photos of Tenerife in the surface section of this site as soon as I get round to resizing them etc.
Until then, just one of Mt Teide
Plymouth Trip March 23, 2006
Posted by wannabemermaid in : Life, The Universe And Everything , 2commentsI spent the weekend of the 11-12th June diving from the ‘Furious’ off Plymouth and staying in Pete’s B&B (highly recommended).
First things first, I had a great time. Despite dire predictions about the weather and more sensible people deciding to stay at home the club headed down to Plymouth regardless and for me at least, it was well worth it.
The weather on Saturday was actually pretty reasonable, a bit choppy and with a rather annoying swell but not too bad. A number of our group suffered pretty badly with seasickness but fortunately I was fine (although I suspect that thse people who suffered will be rather hoping that the slightly smug people who didn’t, will get some rough weather later in the year!).
We got out to Eddystone reef in the morning. I was doing my first dive with new kit and a couple of people in our group needed to notch up some leading dives so I got to be ‘lead’ around the reef. We dropped down the shot to around 12m then pootled a little bit further down the edge of the reef. We essentially just followed the reef around for a while staying just above 20m and having a look at the wildlife. All very pretty with lots of crabs hiding among the seaweed (sorry, I need to get a better grasp of UK wildlife before I can be anymore specific!). The swell and surge was pushing us around a bit which made me a little uncomfortable because I don’t feel so in control in those conditions but it didn’t do any real harm. We spotted another of our group lose their DSMB and reel (somehow unclipped itself) but I had to let my buddy retrieve it as I was trying be be a good Ocean diver and stay above 20m so he got all the credit! We came back to the shotline which I would have been very impressed by if my ‘leader’ had not looked as suprised to see it as I was! I managed to maintain my 5m safety stop despite the swell which I was pleased with as I often have trouble getting my suit to dump air fast enough as I ascend (I think it’s an issue with the weezle undersuit as well as me being a bit useless!) but my mind was taken off worrying about buoyancy by spending 3 minutes playing scissor-paper-stone underwater - I think overall I lost. All in all a good dive in less than perfect conditions and thanks to Bob for taking me in despite being horribly seasick.
The second dive of the day was the James Egan Lane, a lot of our group decided against this due to seasickness, leaky drysuits etc but I wasn’t going to miss it after seeing the articles about it that people had brought along. We descended down a shotline again and onto the bow (I think) and headed a little way down the side of the main structure before following it along it’s length until it opened up. I loved the fact that for most of the length all of the decking has been lost so we could swim along ‘inside’ but with a clear exit upwards. I was just enjoying swimming through it with my buddy, taking in the scale of it and poking around for wildlife when I got caught by a particulary forceful surge and helped between two of the uprights a little faster than I was planning! It was actually good fun, if a little suprising, but didn’t happen again. To end the dive we ascended up a DSMB, my buddy ended up deploying it single handedly as I had a minor panic that my feet were floating (I’m not actually sure they were but it worried me) and I ended up holding on to a bit of the wreck until I was sure I had sorted myself out and calmed down. We did a nice steady ascent to 5m but this time my stop was a bit less sucessful, I ended up ascending very slowly and steadily through it. Not a problem as I was well inside my no-deco time and my buddy could watch my fins from his safety stop but frustrating as I am really not ready for deco diving if I can’t hold a stop and I really should be able to do it by now!!
On the Sunday the weather conditions were worse and we decided that rather than try to get out too far in it, we would dive the fort off the breakwater. About half the group elected to stay somewhere dry and warm but willingly helped us get our kit on the boat in the drizzle first (thanks to all of them) and the rest of us headed out to the breakwater. Again for the first dive I was being lead so I descended with my buddy to about 10m at the edge of the fort, the vis was a lot worse than the previous day and not helped by the 3 pairs of divers descending towards the silt at the bottom! We swam clockwise around the fort poking into all the crevices and investing the various pieces of metal down there but didn’t do too well on the wildlife (especially when compared to another buddy pair who found a couple of squat lobsters and a conger!). We moved away from the fort and out onto the sand to and put up the DSMB to ascend. We had been joking on the surface about whether this would qualify as my low vis dive (for my Sport diver) so my buddy then decided to help out a bit by stirring up some of the silt! The vis went to nil and we ended up swimming out of the cloud holding hands, it was interesting to see how suddenly the vis changed on the edge of the cloud. At that point I realised that I had lost my torch, told my buddy and we headed back into the cloud of silt in an attempt to retrieve it but there was no chance so we ascended (this time managing my stop fine). My buddy was apologetic about the torch but I wasn’t cross with him, it was largely my own fault for not having the lanyard tight enough round my wrist, being silly with the silt was good fun (I think we were far enough from the fort not to cause a problem for anyone else trying to dive around it) and an interesting experience to see just what ‘low vis’ really means.
Four of us went in again later for an attempt to retrieve my torch, we had a search pattern sorted out and had made the torch the aim of the dive but by then the vis was so poor generally that we had trouble figuring out where we were let alone spotting the torch. My buddy and I managed to lose the fort (yes really!) when looking for the torch out over the sand, although we did spot a couple of dogfish. Pete had told us to swim in a certain direct away from the fort to surface as he didn’t want to come in too close to certain areas, so we duely did so (first test of my navigation skills!). We went in the right direction, only thing was, we went a bit further than was strictly necessary, if we’d carried on much longer we’d have passed the breakwater! We ascended up a DSMB again and my stop was fine although my buddy was struggling a bit, he realised when dekitting on the surface that he’d been cold on the first dive and left a fleece on under his drysuit which had trapped more air making him a bit light.
So, all in all a good weekend. The second two dives were not nearly as scenic as the first but I did manage to get 4 of my 5 experience dives for Sport diver done (apparently kicking up my own silt didn’t count as low vis but the second dive when the whole place was like soup did!).
Thanks to everyone who buddied me, helped me with kit, wrestled the DIN inserts out of cylinders for me, planned things and carried kit backwards and forwards even when they weren’t diving and of course to Pete and his wife for a great time on the boat, a lovely B&B (with especially lovely resisdent dog!) and hot tea after dives!
I thought I’d finish up with a couple of pics that I was sent.
Me getting back on the boat
Me underwater on the first dive on Sunday - yes that’s the missing torch, bright yellow thing in the bottom left of the photo - if anyone finds it I’ll buy them a pint for it’s safe return!!
Welcome February 7, 2006
Posted by wannabemermaid in : Life, The Universe And Everything , add a commentThis is my first attempt at a web page, I am aiming to have a blog on the first page and keep the other pages up to date with what I am up to in diving, work and the rest of my life.
