Diving - My Continuing Adventures underwater
To the sea!
And so, after a few inland dives, it was finally time to get back in the salty water.
The RHIB had been serviced and relocated to Portland, where we keep it usually (although that may change soon!).
I was running the day and, as we had mainly experienced divers, my plan was to dive a site I'd been on a few years ago, about a mile from the harbour wall.
As we headed out, the sky was covered in thin cloud with blue peeking through, but the sea was quite choppy.
Caroline drives the boat towards open sea
Given the conditions, that made the decision to return within the harbour wall and dive a wreck there.
The Countess of Erne is a well known (notorious?) wreck, much frequented by dive boats for that 'second dive' and the vis is frequently awful, but as we seemed to be the only people out in mid-March, we hoped it may be relatively decent.
There were 5 of us, so we dived in two waves. Caroline and Phil went in first and as Seadhna, Kim and I waited for them to return, we spotted a seal over by the harbour wall.
When our divers returned, they were enthusiastic about the dive, despite 8C water temperature and 1.5M vis, because they'd spent much of the dive with that seal!
The rest of us went in as a 3 and found the vis was terrible as we feared, but we saw the seal a few times as well, so everyone was pretty positive about that.
We were joined by a Seal on our first dive
My own dive was a bit of a disaster. Almost from the start, I found my feet getting floaty, something I never usually experience.
I'd had no issue descending and hadn't changed anything in my kit or weighting, so I was at a loss to explain it.
After around 35 minutes I indicated we should end the dive, but as I got to the 6M safety stop, I found that I couldn't hold the stop.
I tried hard to swim back down and to dump air I didn't seem to have, but unavoidably I broke the surface after a minute or so of strenuous battling.
Worse still, I'd dropped my torch on the ascent, the others seeing it drop past them and into the wreck!
It had been a shallow dive, so no serious harm was done and we headed back to Portland Marina to refill our cylinders.
We ate our lunches and had a warm drink and then everyone agreed we'd go back to the Countess and try and find my torch.
The odds of finding it seemed pretty good as it had been spotted falling into one of the open hatch areas.
Caroline didn't do the second dive, so we were two pairs, but sadly neither group was able to locate the torch.
It was probably the stern area in which it fell and by the time Phil and I got there, the visibility was down to zero.
We headed back to Ferrybridge, where Darren had kindly come down for the day to recover the RHIB as Ferrybridge Marine no longer provide the service, making it a poor option in the medium term, despite the very reasonable price.
Phil, Seadhna and Kim joined us
Hopefully we will be able to find a suitable alternative soon and get more use from the RHIB in 2025, but at least it had been out and the club had its first sea dives of 2025 recorded.
It had been a frustrating couple of dives, only saved to some degree by the seal sighting, but marked my 500th hour under water. Another small milestone in my diving experiences.
Bad weather and colds!
Aside from taking a returning diver into the pool for a refresher, I didn't dive much in the rest of March, so my next dive was in April.
Phil, keen as ever, was eager to do a night dive at Vobster, so we booked in to go there on one of their Thursday night sessions.
Unfortuately, I came down with a heavy head cold and had to miss 3 dives (that one, a trip to mark some underwater obstacles in a fishing lake Darren knew of and a drysuit familiarisation dive with a new member), so my next planned trip was a shallow, easy hard boat dive at Swanage, doing a drift dive first and then visiting the amphibious Valentine Tanks.
Unfortuately, as the previous two years, the weather contrived against us and 12 people were disappointed.
4 of us, though, made the trip to Vobster as we'd blocked the day out to go diving anyway.
Between this dive and Portland, I'd come to the conclusion that the shoulder air dump valve on my drysuit had stuck closed, hence the terrible buoyancy issues I had then, so I was keen to see if the problem was me or resolved.
Sadly, one of our group nearly passed out (possibly due to an overly tight neck seal on his new drysuit) while kitting up and wisely decided to skip the rest of the day's diving, fortunately suffering no further ill effects.
Therefore, John, Andrew (a newly qualified OD) and I dropped in for a shallow dive.
After Andrew struggled for a bit, we managed to get down to the road, passing the Escort and then reached the plane.
I'd got separated from the others, but spotted a torch at the plane, just as I was about to surface.
I swam over and it was John's so we continued on.
We swam through the plane tail and mid-sections and then John turned sharp right and we found ourselves on a small boat and some platforms at around 8M.
There appeared to be a drop off to the left and I didn't recognise where we were, so I turned around, passed the plane and we swam through the concrete tubes, before swimming around the top of the crushing works.
John indicated Andrew was low on air at that point and so we ascended up the path to the shallow area, where there were a fair number of biggish Perch.
Andrew struggled to stay down, being completely feet-up and holding a rock to finish his safety stop, but he managed it and we exited the usual point.
Obviously he needed some more weight for the second dive.
We had a 90 minute break, despite sea dives being blown out and it being a bank holiday weekend, it was very quiet at Vobster.
We made sure Andrew had a few more kilos (3 I recall) and dropped in again.
This time he sank more easily and, while his buoyancy still wasn't perfect, it was better on this dive.
We headed out and quickly reached the wheelhouse.
Vis still wasn't great, but it was better here than near the plane on the first dive, so we were just able to make out the shape of the Jacquin wreck.
We swam along one side and then up onto the top, swimming quickly through the roof of the cabin and out of the door.
From there we headed back to the wheelhouse, which we swam through, and then up, past the Ford Escort and over to the plane again.
At that point, Andrew was getting low on gas (like many new divers, including me in my time, he used a lot!), so we headed back towards the shallow, but this time ascended up to 6M on the wall, where we managed a mostly controlled safety stop by Andrew, before surfacing right under the pagoda we'd been assigned to, where our non-diver was waiting.
We exited via a ramp nearby and decided to call it day after that as the vis wasn't great and the temperature surprisingly cold at 7-8C at depth.
At least, though, we had got in the water and had a couple of dives on a day we'd hoped to be back in the sea.
Thankfully, too, I'd had no buoyancy issues either, so I think I could put the problems at Portland behind me.
I took my camera, but the vis had been pretty bad, so I never bothered switching it on on the first dive and left it in the car for the second!
