A review of diving 2011

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.

So here is a better year of diving in 2012!

Diving the 'Lord Percy' & Landing craft 15th October 2011

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.

Or you can use the following link to go to the YouTube site:Lord Percy & Landing craft  

Diving at Babbacombe 1st October 2011

Not the best dive I have had at Babbacombe but I needed it after some months of not being underwater!

Mushroom rock was the best place by far with what I think were bream, a lobster nearby and interestingly a conger eel in a hole at just 10 Metres!

Or if  you prefer you can go to the YouTube link>Diving at Babbacombe 1st October 2011

Lobster Pot Diving 6th August 2011

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:

 Lobster Pot Diving 6th August 2011

Diving on the Bomber 2nd August 2011

This posting of the dive is a bit late!

I have just started to number my dives on the videos now; I guess that I have reached a respectable number of dives that I can feel smug enough to number them. This is dive number 195 since I restarted diving, which I think is pretty cool.

This is now my third dive on the Bomber and I feel that we are not getting any closer to identifying the wreck. I fact I feet that we are getting further away from naming the plane, I put that down to Julian locating a further two engines!!

So then next time I dive on the Bomber I am going to place a ‘tag’ on them and go hunting for these two other engines.

Sadly the wreck has been “trawled” so the engines and one other major part of the wreck have been moved. That means any mental map that I may have had of the wreck is now useless.

Before the dive we had our pre dive briefing by Roy the skipper this was followed up by a detailed set of photos and drawings by Julian in a planned approach to identifying the wreck.

I was specifically looking for the lights on the wing for this dive, without success I may add. We did carry out some digging at what we felt was the wingtip but that did not reveal anything apart form reducing the viz!!

 

This dive was a threesome with my usual dive buddy Dan plus my son Will. The visibility was not bad but the big plus was that we caught three lobsters!

Or if you would like to watch the video in Youtube then click on the following link:
 Diving on the Bomber 2nd August 2011