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