Diving - The adventure continues!

Diving with Aldershot Dolphins, January to June 2012

As I mentioned earlier, I joined my local BSAC club in January 2012.

My main reasons were to get more experience and practice and find some more like minded people to dive with.

As a PADI AOW diver, I fall between two BSAC stools really - More experienced (and able to dive to deeper depths) than a BSAC Ocean Diver, but lacking some of the skills (First Aid, Rescue and DSMB deployment mainly as I've done the PADI Enriched Air and Dry Suit courses too) to reach the Sport Diver level, so my first aim is to reach that level.

Most weeks I dive in the Farnborough Leisure Centre pool. It's not deep (just 3M at deepest), but it's good experience for controlling buoyancy, improving gas consumption and general dive fitness and just enough to practice some of the skills required for Sport Diver.

It's been a lousy spring, but I have done a few dives.

The first was to Littleton Lake, near Shepperton. Mainly a sailing lake for the Civil Service Sailing Club, the club (and others) has access to a small area cordoned off for diving. There are a couple of cars and a small motor cruiser in the lake and some platforms. It's only about 11M deep at most, but it's diving nonetheless.

Our first dive was in March, when 5 of us when for a single dive in quite cold weather. We were only in for 45 minutes or so, but it was a good way to check out dry suits and have a 'proper dive' after weeks of ploughing up and down the pool.

Visibility was very good and we were lucky enough to spot the lake's Pike, apparently a rare sight. For me, it was my first dive with the club (I sensed they were checking me out a little) and I was pleased to see that my air consumption wasn't too heavy, coming up with only a little less than the much more experienced divers I was with.

Our next dive was offshore as the club chartered a boat from Poole for a couple of days. The diving was fairly tame, but quite enjoyable (if rather cold and a bit choppy for some on the boat - more than one was seasick).

Our first dive was off Swanage on the Peverill Ledge.

We dropped in and descended onto a sandy floor and then over a reef, with a fair amount of sealife, notably some pretty large spider crabs.

After 40 minutes or so we surfaced and were picked up by The Rocket, our dive boat for the day.

After a few hours, having lunch and sheltering from the swell back in Poole Harbour (just off Brownsea Island), we headed out directly south of Bournemouth Pier to dive The Petrified Forest.

I had heard very good things about this, but my dive wasn't too great as after about 10 minutes, I could feel my chest getting cold - the sign that I had water getting into my drysuit. It got worse and worse and, although it didn't affect my buoyancy, I had a very scrappy dive (not helped by my weight belt being a litle loose and shifting all the weight to one side of my body, which I was constantly fighting against.

People have said you can see fossilied tree stumps in the Petrified Forest (hence its name), but I just saw flat slabs of rocks and eventually we drifted off these onto a sandy expanse and surfaced. Once up it became clear that most of the other buddy pairings were on the surface too and in a similar area.

Back on the boat it became clear I had got a lot of water in my drysuit, but I dried off and dressed and was soon feeling warm and not too disheartened. I think the water had simply leaked in my neck seal as a later test revealed no problems with the suit.

A couple of weeks later we did another dive in Littleton, which went well and, once again, my air consumption seemed to be improving. Visibility was pretty good, although more patchy than the first time we had visited and I don't think we saw another living thing (except the 3 other divers who we counter-circulate against) all the dive.

On the plus side, the sun came out as we got out of our drysuits, meaning we got warm quickly and I was home in time for lunch.

I returned to Poole (and the Rocket) with the club on 20th May, to dive the SS Venezuela.

The dive was really good as the wreck isn't completely broken up and is inhabited by lots of sealife.

There were a couple of Congers hiding under deck plates and crabs and lobsters galore as well as a few fish living on the wreck itself.

Every now and then, I would catch movement out of the corner of my eye and it was usually a huge school of fish (I couldn't tell you what, but they were silver and about 12-18 inches long) swim just outside the wreck.

Sadly, we broke golden rule one of diving and failed to keep a close eye on our bottom time. As we set off back up with 70 bar remaining in my tank, we both had significant deco time reporting.

Things got worse near the surface as, after doing most of the stop time, I took my buddy's Octopus and we bobbed to the surface with about 5 mins deco still reporting.

Fortunately we had no problems as a result, the computers are quite cautious, but it was a sobering experience and will make me more conscious of monitoring my dive time in future and reinforces the golden 'Plan the dive and Dive the plan' rule...

The following week I was off to Plymouth to try and undertake my long delayed PADI Wreck Dive course and, that mishap notwithstanding, I was feeling more comfortable with diving all the time, even my once awfu air consumption rate had reached about average. Read about my Wreck Diving course, here

We had hoped to get out on the Rib over the Jubilee weekend, but the weather was against us again, so my diving was restricted to another quick dip in Littleton Lake.

The temperature was a balmy 18C, so it was a pleasant experience, but there was a bit of a bloom reducing visibility over the crystal clear conditions of previous dives there.

Probably the only notable point was that this was the first dive on which I'd formally acted as the leader, to another Sport Diver trainee and it went fairly well with only a minor navigation issue that saw us revisit the wreck of a small motor cruiser a second time, but I'll claim we just extended our dive as it was a bit early to get out first time!

Read some more of my diving experiences, by clicking the icons below.

 

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