Diving the Far Mulberry 14th April 2012

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!

If you wish to access the Youtube site Far Mulberry 14th April 2012 

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
 

Diving on the Nab Tower 26th July 2011

Diving on the Nab Tower is an excellent dive that can be done at all states of the tide and is a typical Solent dive. It has it all, with the life, lobsters, fish of numerous species plus the gloom/darkness.

I feel that this is an excellent dive for a wreck/20 metre experience for a novice diver. To explain this rather strong statement I have to explain the wreck. The magic is the underwater structure, which can be seen from the picture below taken during the building of the Nab Tower.

 

Underwater the Nab Tower is described as a wedding cake structure each step about 5 metres. So you can structure your dive anyway you wish, with the depth that you wish.  Diving with a ‘novice’ diver, ie one that has neither dived at the 20 metre depth or with little Solent experience, I have set out a very simple dive plan beforehand.

We are dropped off by the boat in the lee of the Nab Tower and surface swim to the Tower. We then descend to the first tier if ok proceed straight down to the second tier and so on until we get to the bottom, or fourth tier if you wish, at ~20 Metres.

The most important point of this dive plan is in the explanation beforehand that we only proceed if the ‘novice’ diver is happy and it is carefully reinforced the first rule of diving, that one does not do anything if you are not happy or confident with.

Equally the dive plan can be set out which tier is the bottom of the dive. The lead diver can equally stop and return to a higher tier during the dive if they feel that the novice diver is ‘under stress’.

We can then proceed around the selected tier until the tide stops you and return around the base then ascend up a tier. Each tier can be explored in turn and they are all different with their different types of life.

So finally one gets to the last 5~7 metre tier so the safely stop is the last tier, admittedly not the best tier but a lot better that hanging on a line in the gloom for three minutes.

I do not normally post my dive computer underwater profile but I feel that this time it explains the dive in the best way.

This dive was a threesome dive with my regular dive buddy Dan plus my daughter’s partner Josh. Josh comes from that ‘clear water diving land’ of New Zealand and is an Advance Diver and this was to be his first dive out of New Zealand!

I was glad that his holiday schedule over here allowed his dive to be the Nab Tower.

This dive on the Nab was rather unusual in as much as it was at a slack tide but I did not take that on board at the time during the dive. So we could have gone all the way around the Tower but we didn’t.

As you can see during the video the two diving styles are very different with Josh’s 1~2 metre dive style off the bottom verses Dan’s ‘on the bottom’ technique, common amongst ‘Solent Divers’.

This is definitely one of the most relaxing dives one can have in the Solent, one just has to watch out for the tide wall when the tide is running otherwise one could get swept away.

The Nab Tower is also the place where one can pick up lobsters and, as can be seen in the video, Julian is the diver who can always locate and catch a lobster on his dives! It was big enough that he sent the lobster up using his lift bag!!

 A really nice dive.

To view the video on the Youtube website click the link:

Nab Tower 26th July 2011