Introduction
Today my buddy, Rob, and I were diving at Buckland Lake, Kent. He's recently purchased a Halcyon Single Tank system. I'm trying to get him dived up so we can start doing some shallow sea dives together.
Dive #1 is of no real interest, Dive's #2 and #3 are the interesting ones.
Dive #2
Objective : Find the tunnel in the far wall
Summary:
There are two tunnels at Buckland Lake, one of them is very easy to find by following a trench (follow the line from the platform to the right, as you approach a large boat on the left of the line, if you look down, there is a trench ... follow that for about 2-4 minutes and bang - tunnel #1). The other one that is on the far wall of the quarry is much more difficult to find.
From the pontoon, we took the main-line to the right all the way out the Lorry Platform, from here we carried on to the tail of the plane. Swimming straight along the length of the plane to the nose, we then took the line off towards the Pump House.
Viz was challenging today, so the normal gin clear water that allows for easy navigation was certainly somewhere else. The line ends at a large pipe. To visit the rest of the pump house you need to veer off to the left. We needed to catch the other line, so I led off to the right. Sure enough after around 20 seconds we hit the line.
After establishing the correct direction of travel, we swam away from the pump house and after around 30 seconds I stopped. I deployed my reel and tied into the line. I then led as I swam away at a right angle to the line towards the wall.
The expanse is pretty much barren apart from the odd tree which I had to tie in to to keep the line taught. It took around 10 minutes before we hit the wall. Again I tied into a tree. I've got a 400' line and I'd put out around 175' of it. At this point we turned to the left as we had no idea where exactly the tunnel was, nor did I know if we had hit the wall left or right of it.
Swimming along the wall we had to travel through quite a few fallen trees, they provided some good tie-off's and meant it was a bit exciting as the tunnel could be hidden behind them. We swam on for around 15 minutes when Rob and I found a suspicious group of tree's. For some reason it was very dark behind them, so naturally we suspected the tunnel would be there.
I tied the line off to a few branches so that it was secure and then we started pushing through the tree's. It was tight and dark. After pushing about 5 or 10m in, we quickly decided it's not worth pushing any further as it's just tree roots. Pulling out we then carried on, searching high and low until I had to turn us around as I was running out of line.
So we tracked back to the original wall tie off. Rob led while I pulled the line.
Returning to the original wall tie off, we then headed in the other direction. It was much like the first side, lots of fallen tree's and some non-fallen - you could see that this was once wooded land until Buckland flooded. Again for another 15 minutes we swam on, looking everywhere and tieing off regularly. It seemed like the wall kept turning to the left.
Looking at my reel I had maybe 50' of line left, I wasn't keen on traveling off without a line in case we lost it, plus it meant an easy way home to just follow the line, rather than a long fatiguing surface swim.
Thinking it was time to turn I started to swim faster to catch up with Rob who was leading at this point. I was just about to wave my light to get his attention when something odd appeared in the wall. It looked like the buttress of a castle. Made out of large terracotta bricks.... it couldn't be the tunnel could it? The quarry wall then disappeared as we rounded the buttress.
Sure enough this was the tunnel. It was covered with a grid. Circling around the bottom of the tunnel and then coming around the right hand side before reaching the top I got a grasp for how large the tunnel was.... easily large enough for a lorry.
As I came around I found a gap in the grid ... big enough for a twinsetted diver to get through - me thinks a return visit is needed :-). We had a good nosey about, at this point the dive time was around 45 minutes, so we turned about and headed back to shore for drinks and food before planning the next dive of the day in the glorious sunshine!
Dive #3
The previous dive was a definitely Yang, this dive was the Ying...
Objective: Conduct a dive, burn tanks down to low pressure to perform low gas weighting check.
All but the last 10 minutes of this dive were fairly plain and simple. We jumped in and went off "to the left" where the slightly deeper stuff is to get cooled off. We then worked our way back along the mainlines to the plane. We had been inside it on previous dives and Rob had noticed hatches at the back so on this dive, he wanted to try and see where the hatches came out ... So when we arrive at the plane he goes straight for the interior and heads to the tail and sticks his head about the tail to check where the hatches go ... and guesses where on the outside they might be. So we come back outside and swimming along the port side we arrived at the wing, Rob looks under and he believes that one of the hatches is under there. So off he goes, squirming away under the wing with about 2' of clearance between it and the mud. It soon gets very silty and I can't see, nor do I have the inclination to follow! So I saw over the wing to look for Rob coming out .... hmm can't see diddly squat!
Just as I'm passing over the wing, I feel a tug on my left fin, I turned around and I see an arm coming out of a hole between the wing and fuselage! I swim over, and a diving mask comes into view, its Rob! He's in a gap where the wing has broken away from the fuselage. I must admit, I chuckled, thinking how the hell did he get there! So i gave a light hearted, "you" ... "ok" .... and a very frantic head shake came back to me.
He tries to wriggle about but gets no where .... Oh shit ..... He's stuck, and we are doing a dive where we are intentionally running our tanks low. He probably has 70bar left in the 12, I look at my SPG, 50 bar in twin-12's ... fuck ... that won't last long with a bit of stress..... My first thought was "how on earth do I tell his family (that I've met and know well) that he drowned, I was with him but couldn't save him". It was a very morbid moment, but a quick snap back.
Let's sort this... First of all, lets look around a bit. So I moved over to what would be the trailing edge of the wing and look under, I can see the blue fins, I gave them a pull and squeezed his knee to let him know that there is an easy way out ... Right, I went back up to Rob, and tried to gesture to go down. He shook his head and pointed over his shoulder at the tank. So I came in close, pulled my light out and looked in....
A birds nest of cables would be an understatement, shit, he's well and truly tangled I thought. Now I start thinking of cutting him out of his gear putting him on my long hose and we share air and ascend together, that would be stressful to do (the cutting him out and getting him out) but it could be our last option.
There are dozens of heavy cables and piping dangling all around, so I decide to work methodically, I untangled the obvious stuff from around the 1st stage, that cleared a good bit out. Now jamming my head in (the hole was only about big enough for an average person let alone one panicked guy and one large guy in twins), there's a few more wrapped around the tank, so a bit of pushing and pulling and they came loose.
So at this point, I breathe and do a sanity check, how much gas have I got left? SPG ..... 30 bar ... shit, now we are in the really inaccurate section of the gauge .... fingers crossed it is under-reading. Breathe deep, I push on his head to try to tell him to start wiggling downwards, which he does, I then go down to grab his leg and start pulling. I then see his other leg and start pulling on that .... It takes a lot of pulling but eventually he pops out.
He gestures to say that he is ok. I then say he is an idiot ... I mean a wanker with the appropriate gesture ... but we just floated above the plane for a bit to relax and then we surfaced and chuckled hysterically!
Summary
Well I hoped you enjoyed that small trip report, quite a mixed day, but thoroughly enjoyable!
