Dry dive November 11th at the London Diving Chamber



What a great time we had in the London Diving Chamber last night.

I met up with Helen, Jon and Marcel to do a 50 meter dry dive.

Hoborough Lake 7th November 2010

 We decided to visit Holborough Lake at Snodland in Kent on sunday, with a couple of goals, one was for George to test his drysuit after it's come back after repair and for myself to have another play with the Canon 500D dSLR and the Sea & Sea housing.

The weather was overcast and and slight wind blowing over the lake making it a little chilli. We signed in and left the cylinders to be filled.
We started to kit up it was then George noticed he'd left his BCD at home, not a great problem as you can hire them from Holborough at a reasonable price of £5 per day. The got the cylinders back and finished off kitting up and checking the equipment.

Next for me was the camera setup I'd done most of this at home so it was just a matter of doing the last few bits, checking the strobe was working making sure the lense was clean and clear of bits of dirt. A took a quick couple of photo's to make sure everything was working.

We planned to do 2 dives today, as George had never dived here before, Holborough is a great training with plenty of attractions for you to swim around and also lines run between all the items making it good for newly quialified divers to find there way around whilst having a good dive. For a inland lake the visability has always been a good 8-10m making it good for taking pictures.

 DIVE 1:For me dive 1 was all about taking some pictures making sure I could use the camera and get some good photos in the process. For George this was a checkout dive making sure his drysuit kept him dry. We headed out from the slipway following the lines to the platform , then onto the Sweet Mystery which is a large 30 foot wooden wreck in about 8meters of water. George decided to try hiding  however I found him.We left the wreck following another line this took us past a small tyre and onto a platform in 10meters of water. Onwards to the car half car in the side of the lake and then onto the old 100cc motorbike, we continued down the ropes and then turned back which brings you back onto a small rowing boat. Which we could see from at least 15+ meters. 

We started to head for the speedboat where the visability was still 10+ meters. Which made for some great photographs, one with George looking ratehr vertically challanged but nothing new there.

We then headed back out to the slip way and exited the water. on checking the dive computers we had just completed a 45 minute dive with a maximum depth of 10.1m
DIVE 2:This dive was only going to be a short one I was going to show George were the Gargoils was, I set the camera to video mode, and in we went to get them.

This was a simalar route out past the platform with the upside down bomb next to it onto the Sweet Mystery Wreck, but this time we went over it onto the raised platform and to another small speed boat. This fetched us to a large tractor tyre which always seems to have some large perch swiming around it. We then found ourself onto the mould where the Gargoils are the visability was amazing, shortly after the camera said memory card full. Somehow you can't change them under water. We followed the route back and exited via the slip way again. This dive was a maximum of 8 meters and only 25 minutes.

Vobster Quay 10th September

Well as I was off on holiday I thought we could have a dive at Vobster Quay on the way down to Brixham.

We'd arranged to meet James and Mark, with Sarah and myslef travelling down together, James somehow managed to have a car accident the night before so it was just left to the 3 of us.

The traffic was terrible and we arrived just before 11.00am, Mark had been sat there for a couple of hours waiting for us.

DIVE 1: Anyway finally made it into the water with Mark and myself our first dive was going to be the deepest of the day. I've been wanting to dive the Jacquin II wreck for a while, so we set off to it the bouy and started a free decent down the line, the visability was a good 10m, as we got down to 8m we could start to see the wreck beneath us, the Jacquin II is nearly 60 foot long and was lying on it's side. After swiming round it, Mark managed to get a few pictures I headed over to the PIT which bottoms out at 26m with a car sat in the bottom of it, we headed out of the pit as it was a warm 9C in there. We swam on the 13 meter ledge over to the plane wreck and the tempature came up to a nice 16C. The plane wreck is split into three sections and the first part was the tail section, then swimming through the middle section and finally through the side door of the cockpit and out throught the back.

We headed over to the Ford Escort as we was making our way up the road, I showed Mark where the tunnel starts as we started our ascent up from 12m when we got to 6m we had the usual 3 minute safety stop and then exited the water for a nice cup of coffee.

DIVE 2: Mark wanted to have a look at the Crushing works and Sarah was going to join us for this dive. So we all did a giant stride into the water, we all started to desend however Sarah had a problem with her ear which ment she couldn't equilize properly, which ended her dive.

Mark and myself waited for Sarah to safely get out the water so we could carry on as Mark wanted to have a look at the crushing works , so we swam round the side and descended down to 6m platform I led and swam over to a small boat wreck and then a drop off to 12 meters and over towards the plane wreck and onto the concrete swim through's as we came out of the last swim through we could see the top of the crushing works. Mark was snapping away , I thought it would be good to swap onto my deco cylinder of 50% as we was at 13m , after spending a few minutes looking at the steel work we headed towards the road to start our ascent to 6m for the usual 3minute safety stop at 6 meters.

We got out the water and had anoth cup of coffee, and completed our log books, the first dive had been Mark's 100th dive. Thanks to Mark for the pic's

On with the PADi IDC

I've now started my PADi IDC (Instructor Development Course) with Blue Ocean Diving , the first 2 days are all classroom based, going through all the PADi standards and understanding how modules and courses are taught.

Tonight is the first pool session watching a presentation to get the feeling and know how it's done.

4th/5th September was a full on more classrom room presentations with my second classroom presentation of the "5 pieces of specialized equipment used for deep diving. After 6 -7 minutes of my talk I was told that I'd achieved the pass rate however I'd managed to get a 4.0, a 3.6 being the minimum pass mark.

The evening session (saturday) was to confined water presentation the first being partial mask flood, and fin pivot using low pressure inflator. Sunday's session was regulator recovery, the second skill was remove and replace scuba unit in water to deep to reach the surface.

Well another pool session last night thought I'd got away without doing another demo from the confined open water, wrong as Justin had man flew I ended up doing "Air from an alternate source I happy with the result I managed a 4.6 even that I got a couple of things wrong. So overall a great result and the marks are going in the right direction upwards.

The IDC is a massive learning curve and you have to be committed to it as you could get anything from any of the padi courses, meaning lots of reading, more revision and more practice.

Passed the EFR Instructor Course

Managed to pass the EFR Instructor course, and it wasn't as bad as what I believed it was going to be. Top marks have got to go to Ryby (Blue Ocean Diving) for keeping it entertaining and fun as it's not the best subject in the world.

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