Tuesday 1 June 2010

Aeolian Sky Wreck Dive

George and myself joined some of the usual Wraysbury divers for a trip on TANGO out of Weymouth for 2 dives the first being a dive on a Greek Container ship Aeolian Sky that was damaged in a storm around 20 years ago and the second dive would be a drift over a scallop bed.

George picked me up a silly o'clock (around 5.00am) for the 3hour journey down to Weymouth, well as for kit it was the usual twin 12's filled with 28% nitrox and a seperate 7Ltr pony with 50% nitrox, for the second dive I had just a singlw 12Ltr with 32% nitorx.

We arrived at the boat and loaded all the dive gear onto we was the first to arrive.
Finally everyone had turned up all the kit was loaded aboard and the engines was soon started and the mooring ropes was released and we started down the channel. The trip out was going to be about 2 hours so we had plenty of time to setup and check the kit. George and myself was going to buddy up together as we are regular dive buddies anyway.

We arrived at the wreck and Phil the skipper throw in the shotline, we arranged ourselves in order to go into the sea George and myself we the second group to go.

Phil brought the boat around and George and myself lined up to jump into the water, then splash we was in we swam over to the shotline. One quick last check and we started to follow the shotline down to what was the accomodation block on the wreck. Phil had managed to get it spot on we was at 18m. We dropped over the side of the accomodation block and onto the lower part of the wreck which was around 28-30m,

George was already looking for eating crabs or lobster, he;d already missed a lobster. As we continues to look at wreck we both saw the mother of all lobsters, what went through my mind was I was going to need a bigger bag to put it it, however this lobster was having none of it and then decided it would chase us, so we let it off.

After 30 minutes on the bottom it was time to ascend we moved up to around 25m and George sent up his SMB, we did a deep stop at 21m for a minute this allowed me to swap onto my 50% deco cylinder and then made a nice slow ascent upto 6m where our final safety stop for 5minutes.

Once on the surface Phil brought the boat around and George got on the lift first then I was on next, that was dive one completed.

Once everyone was on the boat we headed back in to Weymouth so we could do the Scallop dive, which was only going to be around 30 minutes. Phil provided us all with hot cross buns and more tea's and coffee's.

After nearly 2 hours we were ready for the second dive a few people decided not to dive however this didn't stop George and myself, so in we went again this time straight to the bottom and start looking for scallops, they was all around us and we managed to get around 50 between us.

Once back onboard we started to sort them out with all the undersize one going back into the sea, we ended up sharing about 40 between us.

We moored up again unloaded all the dive gear and went round for a drink in the local pub, then after we had fish and chips on the quayside