City of Ghent courtesy of Mark Milburn http://mark.thedeepstop.com

The BBQ on Friday night was excellent, part of the overall vibe of these trips is our customary BBQ. Whilst we had good weather we took advantage of it and decided to have on the Friday night as well. The scallops were delicious, meticously prepared and cooked by Joe, they went down extremely well.

We awoke Saturday morning to clear skies and very little wind again. On excellent neap tides this was going to be a good day. The early birds went out on the first run of dives, whilst the afternoon group kicked back and enjoyed the morning. Lisa and I were going to go diving together on this one as my parents were going to join us this morning to look after the kids back on the shore.

At 1pm we headed out, Celtic cat was loaded up and off we went, the scheduled dive site being the City of Ghent.

http://www.digigreen.net/

Lisa and I at the bottom of the shot on the city of ghent,

photo credit- Tim Ingmire,

Tim’s picture above shows the fantastic visibility we experienced on this dive. As we descended we were on perfect slack, the shot line just hung in the water. We made our way to the upturned hull of the City of Ghent, Lisa’s mask was flooding again and so she stopped to sort it out, Tim took the picture above just as she had cleared it. After she cleared her mask we headed for the bow. Mark Milburn’s picture at the beginning of this post and the one below show the state of the bow section.

PICTURE TO FOLLOW

From the bow we headed back along the starboard side until midships where we crossed over the collapsed hull through a exposed section to the port side. Around the stern section where the prop had been removed and then caught on camera rounding the stern.

PICTURE TO FOLLOW
We peered in and made our way through a nice large and clear swimthrough of the stern section appearing again at the midships point where we had crossed over the to the port side. As we were now nearing our planned bottom time of 30mins, I unclipped my SMB, made ready to deploy and then noticed the shot line. I was tempted to make our way back up the shot line but guessing that slack would be ending and not sure on how Lisa would feel having to hang on for our stops I decided to drift past it and then deploy our bag. A slow ascent saw us both surfacing on 45 minutes. A truly fantastic dive, UK diving is at it’s best when the visibility is that good.

Link to the Digigreen thread on this trip

And to the Yorkshire Diver thread also.

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Ever since I started diving in 2004 I have been coming to Porthkerris on YD trips. This was my fifth visit and Lisa’s fourth, even the children have been three times.

The weather forecast had not been kind, a week of heavy rain and winds meant that the diving and camping was going to be very difficult if not neigh on impossible. Others of the group of 24 divers that would be coming down for the weekend had been camping for three days already when we arrived on Thursday. They had not yet got a dive in or really dried out from the rain. As the wind pulled at the tent and the rain fell heavily on Thursday lunchtime as Scott and I battled to get the tent up I wasn’t sure that we would be successful. Then one after another three tent poles splintered in the force of the wind. Now I really was doubtful that we could do this. Scott held on to the tent with all the strength that a little seven year old could muster and somehow we managed to get the poles in position and the tent fairly stable. At this point Simon and Gary arrived still dressed in their drysuits having just got back in from their first dive of the week. They helped us move the tent into a more suitable and safer position and we succeeded in securing it down. The weather cleared a little and we finished it off. Meanwhile the two older girls Elizabeth and Emily had been entertaining Heather in the car. They did a good job as it took us over three hours to get the tent in place. This was worse than two years ago when it took 6 of us to get a similar tent up.

Once the tent was up Scott and I changed out of our sopping wet clothes and we headed off to Penzance to pick up Lisa from the train station. She had had to stay at home for an extra few days as she had rehearsals for her play Dancing at Lughnasa in which she is starring this week (25th June) in the Plaza in Romsey.

During the night of Thursday the wind and the rain continued, lashing down on the tent, but it withstood and come the morning the sun was breaking through the clouds and the wind had dropped off almost completely. Perhaps this was going to be a great weekend.

Today Lisa and I were going to take it in turns diving, she went out on the midday rib dive with Gary, Kathy & Simon, although Simon didn’t quite make it due to lack of mask. (it turned up a few hours later in the pump house), then I went out on the 2pm dive. So Lisa ended up in a three with Gary and Kathy on Vase rock whilst Joe and I went out to the Mohegan and Raglans Reef.

Dive 1 Mohegan/Raglans. Dive time 43mins, Max Depth 24m. Vis approx 6-8m Back in a single 12 and a BCD and how easy it was to lift and get kitted up even on the rib. We dropped straight into the boiler area of the mohegan and drifted gently over the plates. The vis and ambient light meant that torches weren’t neccessary, I only turned mine on once to seek a peek underneath a large plate that provided a decent access to go underneath the wreck and have a good look around. Unfortunately Joe had gone ahead somewhat and was on the edge of visibility so I left that for another time. Also being on a single 12 I was somewhat retisent to squeeze my way in without any real redundancy. So we carried on, after just 8 or so minutes we were off the mohegan and heading over Raglan reef, we cut west a little too early and ended up in the kelp at about 12m. But still had the opportunity to see a fair number of the brightly coloured jewel anemones that were opened up to the current that was bristling past providing them with the nutrients they required. After about 10 minutes or so in the kelp, we decided to call it a day and began our ascent atr 37 minutes. A thoroughly enjoyable first dive down in Porthkerris for a while.

After getting back to the shore at Porthkerris beach I walked back to the tent to catch up with the rest of the family. After dropping the tank off for a fill, I was beckoned back to the rib, the shout came from Gary and Simon, are you coming on this dive then? They were off scalloping, seemed too good an opportunity to miss, so I quickly assembled the kit again, thankfully Lisa had got her cylinder filled from earlier and ran back down to the rib and off we went.

Dive 2 Helford River When we did this dive last year, we encountered three basking sharks on the way, this wasn’ t to be the case this year, but after 68 minutes Simon and I came back to two decent sized goody bags of scallops ready for the BBQ that evening. Turned out we had enough for both nights, so after going through and sizing them making sure that we were being responsible in our scalloping, we placed a goody bag on the anchor bouy of the rib and left them in the water ready for Saturday. We then swam in from the rib onto the shore with our other bag ready for the Friday night BBQ.

more to come…… still got Saturday’s dives to write up

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Back 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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You need to read the post Paranoid on SS El de Bayo before reading this post.

We headed back to Dover Marina for a spot of lunch and a leisurely 4 hour wait for slack. This gave me time to take my sodden undersuit socks to the marina toilet block where there was a tumble dryer, £1 and 40 minutes later my socks were dry. Not trusting my Fourth Element Artics to the tumble dryer I left them out in the sun on the back of the boat to dry and then went for lunch, having failed to top up my tanks from the empty 12L cylinder I brought with me. Next lesson learnt. check all cylinders before I leave home. Thankfully Jay and Aide had a number of 15l with them and I stole a bit from them.

Lunch was very pleasant sat outside the Flagship pub across from the marina enjoying the sun.
We headed out again from the marina at about 2pm and turned right to head down the coast towards Dungeness chasing the vis.

The decision this time was to dive the HMT Drumtochety, an armed trawler from the Dover patrol which sank in 1918 after striking a mine. I quite like diving trawlers as they tend to remain shipshaped – think James Barrie in Scapa Flow. This was no different, apart from sitting upright on the seabed, this time at about 35m. Having dried out and moved my reel to a more accessible position on the stage bottle this time we jumped in. Again the trickle of water started immediately down my leg. We ventured off down the shot, I was a little too eager and had to wait at 12m as I saw that Dianne had stopped. I waited assuming she had had a problem with equalising. A moment or two later Paul passed me going down the shot and signalled that Dianne was indeed having trouble with her ears. At that point I saw her making a large OK signal with her torch and waited for her to join me at 12m. I signalled her to go ahead of me just in case she had any more problems but we glided effortlessly down to the port side of the bow where the shot lay. We didn’t make it all the way to the sea bed as already a number of lines went from the shot onto the deck of the trawler. I unclipped my reel but signalled to Dianne there was little point in reeling off as at this point I was already down to 80bar and so we wouldn’t be going far. We headed off along the top of the railing towards the bow and followed the rail of the ship. The hull was covered in dead mens fingers and other anemones and I spent some time seeing if I could spot any nudibrancs, I couldn’t, I not that good at spotting them. However due to the current still running all the anemones were open and still feeding and it was quite a spectacle. I thoroughly enjoyed it. We made our way back to the shot. Dianne was very wary of my gas guzzling but once back on the shot I still had 50 bar in my twins and would change to deco gas at 12m so was OK. We slowly made our way back up the shot. This time Dianne performed a much better MP3 player deployment and we waited out the safety stop listening to the demo tunes preinstalled on the player. Unfortunately she had not had the time to install any music. I was still impressed though by how clear the sound was.

After 36 minutes total dive time we surfaced. A much more successful dive especially on my part. I must admit at one point I had thorught after the first dive that was it for me for the day, but I was very glad I stayed on to do the second dive. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In the end it was a very good day, I need to give a special thanks to Dianne who was extremely patient as a buddy especially on the El de Bayo when I was being a bit precious.

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I am sure that when I booked on to this dive I can’t have looked at the start time. 7am meet for a 7.30am ropes off. Oh well I thought an early start. I had packed the car the night before so when the alarm went off at 4.45am all I had to do was fall out of bed and into my clothes and into the car. I think I was the last to arrive at the marina but still not late to halt a prompt departure on time. Once loaded onto Neptune we were off, due to the low mist reducing surface visibility we decided to aim for just outside the main shipping lanes and chase the vis. The group decision was Urania or SS El de Bayo. Lying in approximately 40m but with the decks at 32-34m and fairly intact this was a good choice. Paul Oliver has done a fantastic sketch of how she lies which he has posted onto YD - click here

According to Canterbury Divers Website she was sunk in a collision with the Liner SS Westmorland in dense fog. She was struck near the engine room and the damage so severe that within 2 minutes she was completely immersed by the cold dover waters.

My little Wobble

The shot placement for our dive was right in the cargo hold. It was unfortunate that one couldn’t tell until one reeled off from the shot that this is where it was. This for me was the straw that broke the camels back but I’ll come to that. My buddy for the day was Dianne (Chunderfish/Madfish) who was an excellent buddy particularly when I had a bit of wobble on this dive. It started as soon as I hit the water. As I entered I felt a cool trickle of water enter into the left leg of my drysuit, I checked my pee-valve to make sure it was completely closed – it was. Great I thought another leak, it may well be time to change suits. The leak wasn’t too severe and my undersuit was doing a good job of soaking up the water so I carried on. As we descended the shot, the early plankton bloom created a dark curtain that blocked all of the rather glorious but hazy sun from penetrating below 25m. So this was going to be a dark dive. No real problems, I had volunteered for reeling off duties and away we go. Dianne and I had already discussed that we didn’t need to go racing off and cover all of the wreck (just as well really as it turned out). So at the bottom of the shot, unclip the reel. For some reason I could not work it loose. I had placed it on my left d-ring, which was not a wise choice, as it had got caught up with stage cylinder and I couldn’t get it off. Dianne tried once and failed then finally by yanking the stage out of the way she unclipped it. Hoorah at last , in fact I pretty sure I heard her give a faint cheer. By this time I was a bit cheesed off with myself for clipping it in such a stupid place! I started to reel off and Dianne moved off ahead of me. We had gone a few metres before it dawned on me that I had to tie the line of at places. Thankfully we hadn’t gone too far and I backtracked a little and found a suitable tie off. ”Doh”, I thought, “get it together”. By this time Dianne was a few metres ahead of me and towards the limit of my visibility, I caught her up finding another tie off along the way to find she had stopped and was indicating it was a dead end, at this moment I realised we had swam further into the hold and were surrounded by metal. I will admit to having a small paddy at that point and I signalled Dianne a single thumbs up which we had agreed earlier meant I’m not happy I want to go back. (two thumbs up meant I’m really not happy I wanna go home) At the moment in time, my thoughts immediately turned back to Garf’s experience in Scapa where he and John swam straight from the shot into the wreck and got lost. Now our situation was NOWHERE near that. For a start I had hold of the reel in my hand and we were only two tie offs from the shot. The combined things of leaky suit, the incident with unclipping the reel and the poor vis was at that point enough for me. I was even hearing things in I could have sworn my right post was leaking. Somewhat paranoid.

We returned to the shot and I just hovered there holding the shot. Dianne signalled she was going to have a look around the shot and then along the line left by Paul. It didn’t even register that she meant for me to follow her along the line. When she came back and signalled again, I got the message this time but was still paranoid about my apparently leaking right post. I signalled Dianne about this and she checked – I was all clear. I shook myself from the paranoia and continued on along Paul’s line which went up and over the hold onto the deck. We mooched along the line for a while and I started to appreciate just what a fantastic wreck this was. Unfortunately we met up with Paul and Mark all too soon who were reeling back to head to the shot. So we about turned and made our way back to the shot. We made a nice leisurely ascent completing our deco obligations and then some. Dianne had a rather unsuccessful try with her underwater MP3 player and then we ascended to bright sunshine and a ride back to Dover for lunch.

Evaluating this Dive.

I had a wobble on this dive because of a build of on their own quite minor things, the small leak, the unclipping the reel, heading further into the hold. I allowed myself to get unsettled most by not placing my reel in an easily accessible position. I knew before we entered the water that I would be reeling off, after all this is Dover, it is a return to the shot dive, it is April, plankton bloom it is going to be dark. So why or why did I clip it where I did? Inexperience in reeling off? – Perhaps Complacency? -probably. For the second dive that day I placed in a much more accessible position, ironically we didn’t use it on that dive. Click here for the Dive report on HMt drumtochety

Total Dive time 65 Minutes, Max Depth 38.2m Avg Depth 20.9m Water Temp 9.8 deg Backgas 29% Deco Gas 72%

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So in response to the request on YD, here is my dive blog. I have updated it with a few historical reports and logs that I have made elsewhere, and how it has brought back some fine memories, for example diving U90 on the YD Selsey Gig, or seeing the guns on Kronprinz Wilhelm in Scapa, or indeed the fantastic dive I experienced on the Hispania in the Sound of Mull. Hope you enjoy the Blog, please post yer comments. Look forward to reading them.

Mark

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Sound of Mull – September 2005 – Trip Report

This was another fantastic bit of diving for the weekend, which meant that in 2005 I had managed to dive the north & West of Scotland and had a fabulous time. The weather was atrocious all weekend but the diving was excellent and hispania is by far my most favourite wreck that I want to go and explore again, it was truly stunning. The sound was just great. More reports and pictures are available on YD.

My first time

Thankfully things are work, worked in my favour and I was able to get to Lochaline for the Friday afternoon dive on the Thesis.
I buddied up with John Mitchell who was running sea trials on his new inspo. A thoroughly pleasant dive onto the Thesis, with a little current running. Apparently that is the worst vis that John has ever dived on it, seemed good to me!!!

Back up the shot and we were looking a little like flags in the wind, when Paul, John and I got to the top of the shot at 10m, it was time to let go and bag off. Unfortunately Paul and John did without we noticing and when they let go of the shot I started a rather quick journey towards the surface, so let go and bagged up myself, all good fun.

For Saturday and Monday I buddied Porg, which included Rondo and Hispania and two wall dives on Calf Island and an unpronouncable wall I can’t remember.

Rondo had been one of the wrecks I wanted to do, having not had the opportunity to see a wreck almost vertical on a reef wall before. I really enjoyed this one, which included probably the most interesting 6m stop I have completed yet. It was great being able to complete all the stops on the wreck having a good look around, even got to take my first pic of a nudibranch, (not a particularly good pic, have to work on the macro shots!)

Monday was probably the best day for the diving and this was Calf Island and Hispania. It was fantastic to drop down a 45m wall and try and take it all in, but Hispania was excellent and the 60 minutes we spent on that dive was far too short, next time I will not spend as much time absorbing the anemome wall that is the hull!!!

Thanks to Fiona for running with this one, a really good weekend. It was excellent to catch up with people again and met some new faces.

Helen FH – As ever thanks for buddying up again, it is always a pleasure to go diving with ya!!!

Can’t wait for the return…………

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All of my diving in 2005 was geared towards this trip. Late in 2004 I agreed to go on this trip being nowhere near able to go in terms of ability and equipment. After 8 months of planning, buying, courses and getting in the water and having some great diving experiences I was ready..ish.

We had an absolutly fabulous trip, the report is too long for this blog but can be found here via Yorkshire Divers.

I finally got around to sorting out the pictures from the trip

The report…. Read the rest of this entry »

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