DIR Diving Blog

Saturday starts off with the tail end of a hurricane so the weather is not looking good. Grahame managed to get us a dive when most weren’t able to however it was only the M2. Bit of a waste of 18/45! I’d started off with a plan to take 3 stages for practise but as the sea bounced us around, this became 2 stages. By the time we reached the dive site Andy K was hurling over the side and for the first time in 5 years felt rough enough to sit out the dive. By this point I’d decided that a single AL40 of 02 was more than enough kit and I rather keenly leaped overboard!

The dive itself was actually quite nice, needless to say I’ve dived the M2 before as it’s a popular Portland wreck. Vis was about 3m but knowing the site well made it easy for me to pick out features. We did a tour of the wreck pausing to bag up a grappel that Grahame had asked us to find. Clare later said it was the highlight of the dive for her as she was rather bored. I focused in on the little features and really enjoyed the dive.

Photo above was peering into a hole on the top of the sub. We thumbed the dive at 30 mins bottom time and made our ascent.

Sunday and were are off to dive the Mystery Wreck. The sea state takes its toll and I end up diving with AK, Clare dives with Greg and Bob & Fraser sit out the dive. Really nice dive – lots of picking our way through the wreckage. We again find a grappel for Grahame and bag it up. We spend some time picking through the debris field before again coming across the big coils of wire. AK signals the switch off the bottom stages at 20 mins and we move onto backgas. We thumb the dive at 30mins bottom time and begin our ascent. Very solid ascent with a T2 style ratio deco plan. Unfortunately I end up rather ill which writes off the remaining two days of the trip but that is another story!

Met Mark Emery at Vobster for some scootering today. Not used the scooter for ages with the build up for Tech-2 so it was nice to actually get some decent time on it. I’d actually forgotten how much fun they are!

Dive 1 and I strapped on 3 stages and the gavin and we set off. We toured the shallower part of the quarry at 14m odd and went round all of the objects a couple of times. We then set off around the boat and wheelhouse. I was quite amused to buzz past some rebreather divers – scooters cost less and are more fun one pair of divers even stopped to take photo’s of us when we paused at one point while Mark switched off his bottom stage. At the end of the dive we did the full 9m ascent drill with gas switches, which went a little awry which was my fault for not explaining to Mark exactly what I wanted to do.

Dive 2 and we gave up the scooters to Daz and Clare so myself and Mark just had to swim it! We did a full circuit starting at the deep plane and moved round all the objects. Not a bad dive but the vis was getting noticeable worse. We finished the dive with the 9m ascent drill. Right at the end we then added in a valve drill.

Dive 3 and we were back on the scooters. No stages just raw speed this time. We actually circled about 1/2 of the quarry walls and got to see the petrified forest. Algae had formed on all the branches so it looked like green snow and frost on the branches. We spent easily 1/2 hour on the trigger and I have to say it was superb fun. I managed to time it reasonably well as we reached the exit point just as Mark reckoned his scooter was starting to run out of battery power.

Scooters – the most fun you can have with your clothes on