I have been a bit slack with keeping up this blog with my dives, but that being said diving has been rather slow this year with the very poor weather.
Diving in Chesil Cove always has a difficult entry and exit
to the sea. The viz was rather poor for Chesil, which got worse on the second
dive. I think that this was due to the silt that must have washed into the sea
during the previous weeks of heavy rain.
Not a lot of life due to the poor viz but quite a few spider
crabs! The underwater surge was the worse I have ever come across. The underwater cricket was a first for me
though!
This was a drift dive on the Bembridge Ledges off the Isle of Wight, sadly with not a lot of 'drift' going on.
There was some life underwater apart from Ali, my dive buddy, and myself. There was a dogfish I scared off but I think that the problem is that the bulk of the sea life is below the 10 metre level.
I have in the past used my compass to head eastward to the deeper water and the faster flowing current rather than the 7 Metre deep dropping off point. On this dive we hit our deepest point of the dive at 10.4 Metres at the end of the dive. Ali tends to feel the cold and with a drift dive there is very little diver movement and with a sea temperature of 11C it was a little chilly so this was only a 41 minute dive.
This was Ali's 300th dive and my 202nd dive. Great fun!
A little bit of a worry at the start as we were in the water on a lobster pot line!
These evening dives after work are the best! A complete chill out after a day at work and hopefully a lovely sunset as one reaches the surface.
The first dive of the year and as far as I am concerned it
has been far too long since the last dive.
I have had 4 dives cancelled since my last dive and today
was supposed to be a days diving with Wightdiver, which was also cancelled due
to lack of numbers.
Luckily Simon Bradburn, who runs Southern Coastal Charters,
was able to take a last minute booking with Dan and myself.
A very nice day for a dive and after so long in the water a
simple dive to the Far Mulberry was just what Dan and I needed. The Far Mulberry
is such a simple no stress dive where I feel it is impossible to get lost (well
that is my point of view), with a permanent shot line for decent and accent
(just watch out and not get your fingers pinched in the links) with a 11metre
depth.
Not as much life as I expected on the Far Mulberry. Sadly
lobster pots are being placed close to the wreck, which is regarded by divers
as a no take site. I have noticed a decline in the crab and lobster population
over the last couple of years, which I blame on the location of pots near the
wreck.
The viz was also a bit on the poor side being about 3 metre,
OK for UK
diving but one has to be an optimist.
Needless to say I enjoyed the dive and felt really great
afterwards, just missed that diving!
Well I only had 20 dives
that year and that was with 9 of those in New Zealand!
The UK dives don’t appear to have been memorable either. I
guess that it was just one of those years with too much plankton or too much muck inthe water!
A lot of the summer months
appears to have been blown out so losing out on booked dives, which appears to a common tendency at the moment. I
suppose that I could be a bit of an anorak and log all my dives in a
spreadsheet to see my peak time of the year for diving. Nope!
I guess that the diving for
the lobster pots was the one dive that stays in my mind as a good dive; it is
just that we failed to locate the right pots.
The ‘Lord Percy’ is a working barge
that lies in around 14m of water and rises up to 5m from the seabed. Yes it is
named after me!
Previously some years ago on a days diving on Wightdiver the
second dive was going to be a drift dive but the skipper gave us the option of
investigating an ‘interesting’ blip that he had previously recorded on the
sounder
The naming was based on the fact that
I was the first diver to ‘land’ on the wreck. In fact the viz was so bad on the
first dive that it was my bum that struck it first going down the shot line!
The ‘Lord’ bit was added as the
divers, who were winding me up at the time, thought calling it just ‘Percy’
was rather boring!
It is a rather a grand name for a
wreck of a barge loaded with cement bags. If the viz is right it is an
excellent dive with the gaps between the cement bags homes for a lot of sea
life.
The Landing craft is equally a very
nice dive with lot of nooks and crannies.
This days diving had all the promise
of being really good. Both shallow dives on a nice day so a totally relaxing
pair of dives. I was diving with my really dive buddy Dan and my son Will.
Threesomes on a dive I feel are rather difficult but we have all have dived
together before and for us it works, even in low or poor viz we do not lose
ourselves.
Sadly both of these dives on this
occasion turned out to be pretty poor. We missed the wreck of the Lord Percy!
It appears that the tide turned between the shot line being dropped and us (and
the other divers) getting to the bottom. We were expecting the shot line to be lying
across the wreck! It was not and the plankton bloom was bad enough to give us a
black out at the sea bottom. So just a silt covered bottom in the dark!
The landing craft was a little better
but still rather murky! The dive plan was to send about 20 minutes on the wreck
and then drift off. Good plan but the drift dive consisted of travelling over a
mostly bleak sandy bottom!
We just got bored!
So why load up a boring video, well it
seems a shame to have a blank in my list of uploaded dives.
This was one of those
opportunities to dive in some really unusual places. My dive buddy Dan was
contacted by friends of the family who operated a lobster fishing boat. Roger
and Tony own and run the fishing boat Kll, their problem is the loss of a
string of lobster pots!
Anyway they have a number of
lost pots and hoped that we could retrieve them.
The Kll is not a dive boat
and therefore we needed to sort out a plan to carry out the search and the
location of the string of pots. The Kll has a satnav system that can record the
position of the boat down to the nearest metre.
Therefore we had a meeting
with Roger the skipper to plan out each phase of the dive:
The diving period
Dive entry
Search technique
Lobster pot recovery
technique.
Dive recovery
Emergency measures.
The search techniques
proposed by Roger was excellent with line being laid between two shot lines
that would be in the same position as the missing lobster pots. Therefore all
we had to do was to follow the newly laid line along the bottom until we found
the pot line.
There was a secondary
project during the dive and that was to record, by video, the seabed to
discover the reason for the snagged and cut lobster pot lines.
Dan and I are what I would
call experience divers and have dived in virtually zero viz without getting
lost! Even so we did not undertake this dive lightly and both of use carried
our normal complete set safety and retrieval equipment.
We located a pot line but
not the right one. The one we had located was a very old one that had been lost
many years ago. It is interesting the effort of picking up the pots and the
resulting air consumption compared to a ‘normal’ slow relaxing dive.
So we have to hope for a
better chance next year.
On the way back home we
stopped off for a second shallow dive on a barge that Roger and Tony have in
the past used as a place to ‘drop’ their pots. This proved to be an excellent
and relaxing dive.
If you would like to watch the video on the Youtube website then clink on the following link:
