A new experience -diving the river Dart June 25, 2007
Posted by Mark Gilmour in : Dive Reports, UK diving , trackbackBack in Easter, my Dad, brother and brother in law went out on a friend’s yacht for a pootle up and down the river Dart near Brixham. On the way they managed to lose a grappling hook-type device used to hook onto the mooring bouys. Well when I say lose, they knew exactly where it entered the water and so knowing I was a diver, I was asked if I would go down and have a look for it. I did try and explain that after just one cycle of the tides it would probably be buried especially if it is a sandy river bed but never the less I agreed to have a look. Unfortunately it has taken until last week for me to be down in the area to have a go looking.
So on Tuesday we headed out, this time Emily and Scott came along for the ride on the boat along with Dad and Cap’in Len (as the children called him). We motored gently up the river close to high tide and moored onto the bouy that they were on when the hook was dropped. I got kitted up and jumped in hanging onto the rope that Len had tied onto the bow of the boat to make stop me for drifting off down stream. Dropping into the murky gloom of a tidal river I realised very quickly that the line was going to be too short to reach the river bed in the current so I ascended and asked for my reel. There was no way I was going to let go of the rope or I would be off down the river towards Dartmouth. Instead I was going to descend the bouy line and reel off from the bottom of it allowing the tide to take me over a couple of metres and scour the bottom looking for the hook.
So I descended again and reached the bottom of the bouy line at 13m. I attached my reel and moved over scouring the sandy river bed with my little hand held rack looking for this hook. Even with my Greenforce LED torch penetrating the murk it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the heavy sediment in the water and be able to read my gauges. This being the first time I had used my single tank set up in quite a while I was conscious of my air consumption but this turned out to be of little consequence. I soon settled into a rhythum of moving from side to side and then reeling off a little more extending my search pattern. The current clearing the area I was working in as my digging and scraping stirred up yet more sediment in the water.
I had also deployed a SMB to keep those on the surface aware where I was in the water, especially as there was still an amount of boat traffic including a small water taxi moving across the river. Following my SMB and my bubbles they tracked my position so that when I surfaced after 40 minutes having found nothing, they could direct me to other possible search areas. I reeled off again from the bouy following a slightly different heading but after a further 20 minutes I gave up the search. The river had claimed the hook for it’s own.
I surfaced again after 75 minutes to a huge rainstorm. I slowly made my way to the steps at the stern of the boat and hauled myself in. Sailing yachts are not designed for divers that is for sure!!!
So a quite different sort of dive, just unfortunate that I couldn’t find what we were looking for, but the probability of finding it was quite low.
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