Diving - The adventure continues!
2024 Diving
We were supposed to be diving on a hardboat from Swanage on 6th April, but Storm Kathleen blew all the diving out.
However, Phil, Piers, Justyna and I, who had all been booked on the trip, decided to get a couple of dives in at Vobster instead.
For both Piers and Justyna this would be useful, safe environment diving, given their limited experience.
I dived the Justyna and we jumped in near the airplane and then dropped down.
At first the dive went well, she had no issue descending and we swam past some platforms, the small boat and the glider trailer.
Then we swam onto the the NAS Wreck site and then turned to head towards the top of the crushing works.
Justyna had had a few small buoyancy issues before this, but managed to control the ascents, but after a while she started to float up to the surface.
I surfaced and she said she was fine and was happy to continue, but as we tried to descend, she found that her ears wouldn't clear and we surface swam back to exit.
She tried some of the sinus clearing spray, but it failed to clear her ears properly and she didn't do a second dive.
I took in an extra 2KG of weight on this dive, in case Justyna needed it in her new drysuit. She didn't, but it definitely affected my buoyancy and increased my air consumption on this dive.
A short video from the day
As Justyna wasn't able to clear her ears for a second dive, I joined Phil and Piers.
Piers led the dive, heading from the plane (after a bit of a delay for he and Phil descending), where he passed over the crushing works and then descended down its outer wall in search of the helicopter.
He found it and we hovered over it for a while (he only being PADI OW) and then he led us on to the wheelhouse and the Jacquin wreck, where he indicated he was getting low on gas (I thought he said 50Bar, but he exited with that, so I guess he was being pessimistic or I missed a signal).
We ascended up past the platforms and stopped at the 6M one for a safety stop, before swimming over to the area above the tunnel exit and exited there.
He'd done well, but did swim very quickly and seemingly without considering where Phil and I were, so we discussed the importance of being aware of your buddy's whereabouts post dive, but generally it was a good dive.
A week later, I had a couple of bimbles with John at Wraysbury, primarily to try out new-to-us kit.
I had bought a used Buddy Commando BCD with the thought of taking it on overseas trips (as it's much lighter than my Mares BCD) - I also took a set of Conshelf regulators along for that full retro-diving experience. John had a new, thicker undersuit to try out.
We dropped in from the pier in the car park - We both struggled to descend, John going back to the surface for an extra kilo and I put a house-brick (from the lake bed) in my BCD pocket!
We swam out and quickly found a small boat and beyond that could see the London Taxi - Vis was excellent, probably helped by the fact that we were the first 2 people in the water.
We found another boat and the 737 cockpit, which we swam through, and then swam on, finding the lifeboat nearby.
We continued our dive (me with one eye on my air gauge as I only started with 140 Bar), finding the Wreck Graveyard and then the Die Hard Taxi and a new yacht which I'd seen being sunk on my previous visit.
I thought I knew the way back to shore from there, but soon it was clear I was lost and getting low on air, so we surfaced and found ourselves across the lake from the shop and slipway.
We surface swam across the lake and exited there after a 33 minute dive.
For our second dive, we entered behind the shop, but very quickly the vis deteriorated.
I had hoped to swim past the bus to the cave complex, but we came across the vertical boat after a few minutes in the murk, which I wasn't entirely sure where it was.
I turned left and we came to the pit, so we continued along there, finding a boat, but never the cave complex.
After that, we found ourselves in better vis, so I just continued to swim around, hoping to find something I recognised.
We found ourselves back at the Die Hard Taxi and John tried to navigate us back to the shop, but unfortunately went East instead of West and we ended up back against the shore across the lake from the shop.
However, just before we surfaced, we came across 3 huge Carp, the only fish we saw on either dive, so it wasn't a complete disaster.
We decided to surface swim back from there as John was now low on air, after 42 minutes diving, and exited by the pier in the car park, before dekitting and heading home after a couple of decent dives.
My Buddy Commando worked perfectly (I used 8KG, but reckon 7 would be about right for freshwater in a drysuit) as did my Conshelfs on both dives.
Andy wanted an April dive, so we were back at Wraysbury a couple of weeks later.
Neither he nor I were particularly enthusiastic on the day, as it was cold and we'd both dived in Wraysbury a fair bit over the last couple of months, but we arrived when it opened and, after getting an air fill each (Andy had arrived with 5 cylinders, but none had enough air for a dive!), we dropped in for what turned out to be a long, but single, dive.
We dropped in from the pier in the car park and initially the vis looked good, but then we came across a group of divers and the vis behind them was poor, whether due to them or not was impossible to know.
We found a small boat, which is close to the plane, but we couldn't see the plane (although there was a large Carp there) and ended up swimming to the south end of the lake and reaching the corrugated tunnels and the nearby minibus, where we spotted a large Perch.
We swam through the minibus and then meandered around the lake for a while until, in zero vis, we surfaced.
We decided to swim to a nearby buoy, thinking it maybe the plane, but it was actually one of the larger boat wrecks.
Video from the hour long dive
However, once back down we found the vis better and soon found the small boat near the plane again and, this time, we could actually see the plane a little way away.
We swam through and around that for a while, before heading back towards the shore, eventually surfacing slightly north of the pier we entered via.
After a little over an hour, we decided one dive was enough as it was a fairly cold day and we would have needed another fill to do a second dive anyway.
Vis was very varied, over 5M at times, but zero in other places.
