Return to Powmill Quarry (04-08-2013)

Introduction

My partner and her Swedish friend are visiting for a short while, so I decided to take them to Powmill. In my previous blog when I first visited Powmill I talked about how great it would be to have a little BBQ/campfire, listen to music, eat food, dive and swim. Well that is exactly what we did!
The plan was that I would go diving whilst they wandered around taking pictures, I’d been loaned a camera by a friend so we wanted to test it out and see what we could do with it, so far, we were loving it! We stopped off at Asda on the way to buy one of those cheap, instant-disposable BBQ’s, some burgers and chicken, drink and headed to Powmill, the weather was looking reasonable, not quite the perfect 30 degree sunshine we had been having up until a few weeks ago, but still just nice.
After driving through Powmill town and approaching the lay-by I was pleasantly surprised to see that the gates had been opened and boulders moved out the way!! Brilliant! This meant that I could park my car right at the bottom of the hill, certainly cut out about 80 yards of lugging at least! It took two trips to get the tanks, dry suit, accessories and camping stuff up the hill.I then proceeded to get kitted up to do a dive.

Dive #1

Max Depth :13.2m
Duration : 88 mins
Log :
I’ve brought my reel and wet notes with me, I want to practice line surveying. Ever since I got into DIR diving and heard about projects such as the EKPP and the WKPP being a part of a team of explorers is something that I’d love to do, so my idea is that I need to get these broad skills. I’ve done a Cavern course so I know how to use a reel.
I dropped down to about 3m where the floor is at this end of the quarry and found a rock to make my initial tie off to, (I noted this in my wet notes as “Start”) once I’d done two wraps and it was solid I started heading into the quarry. I kept the quarry wall to my left and I swam slowly looking for decent rocks to tie off to. Its interesting, whenever you are watching someone else lay the lie, you can see a million tie off points, but when its you doing the searching, its much harder! I want the line to follow the general trend of the quarry (wall) which was generally straight at this point, but eventually I could see that the quarry wall was starting to bear to the left (opening up into the tear drop shape) so I needed to tie off and there was a rock I could tie off to (I noted this in my wet notes as “WP1”).
After securing the reel, I left it where it was to head back to my first tie off point (the entrance) and survey it … Once I reached the tie off, I hovered above it to take a depth reading and used my compass to take an azimuth measurement of the line. Now I needed the distance to the second survey station – it was at this point  it hit me, I should have had knotted line. I decided to use an ad-hoc method of measurement – arm spans. I figured that it would help me get a first cut at the survey. By this point I was already 30 minutes in to the dive and it started to hit me how slow the progress has been and will continue to be – I’m doing everything three times over : I’m first swimming along and laying the line, returning to my start point to survey the station, then return to the end of the line to pick up the reel again and continue onwards!
Now I was back with my reel, so I picked it up again and continued onwards, again once I saw that following the quarry wall meant that the line would be bending around a rock I made a tie off (this is “WP2”). I again returned to the previous station to survey the line and measured the distance in arm spans.
With reel once again I continued onwards and came to what looked like an entire tower block of flats worth of shopping trolleys pushed in! I found a solid rock here and this became WP3.
The next waypoint was a car wreckage, after surveying I needed to make a decision as to which direction to head. I was at the point where I either stay to the left side of the quarry as though I wanted to travel clockwise, or turn right to head anti-clockwise. My reel is only 400’ at full capacity which would be nowhere near enough to do the whole site, but I also didn’t want to just do one route, as I figured I would get bored of that.
So I decided that it would be good to start both branches in the quarry just a little so I turned right to start the counter-clockwise branch. I came across a large rock just near the quarry wall – I could clearly see ahead to the quarry wall so I thought that this was as good a place as any to stop and survey up to – I would clearly be able to see my future direction. I made several wraps around the rock before cutting the line to my reel. I had to be methodical about this – I am wearing fairly thick neoprene gloves so I have almost no dexterity under the best of conditions so I had to make sure that I had knotted the tie off well so that at least that end of the line was secure. I then cut the line, and had to re-tie a loop on the end – I only made a small one, about an inch in diameter because I knew that I would shortly be tieing it in again.
I returned to the quarry wall to survey the line from the car (WP4). I tied back into the line and starting heading along the wall in a clockwise direction to find a new tie off which after about 10 minutes turned out to be a car wreckage, so I returned to what is now a branch to survey the line again – at this point I was at 80 minutes of bottom time and starting to feel a chill – I was moving slowly and spending a bit of time just floating there so getting cold was something that was getting to me faster than normal.
I headed into the “pit” of the quarry – the central portion of the quarry that gets down to about 12m. I like to drop down deep so that I can launch an SMB from depth and it will be full when it hits the surface, although with the little 3.3’ SMB I was using, even from 6m a full bag isn’t a problem. Bag launched – I ascended to 9m and hovered for 1 minute as my first “deep stop”. Ascending up the shelf at about 7.5m the shallow shelf appears so I can make some progress towards my exit even as I’m ascending. The shelf slopes steadily up and when I hit 6m – I treat that as my “ceiling” and wait for another minute. From this point I’m doing a 1m per minute ascent at the fastest, so I continue swimming to the exit whilst watching the gauge – I get to 5m, so I have to stop again for another minute.
I’m now at about 84 minutes of run time and now right below the entrance to get in, so its a straight up ascent to 4m and stop, up to 3m and stop, up to 2m and stop up to 1m and stop and then a nice slow ascent over the last metre. I surface to a cheery girlfriend a buzz of cameras firing at full frame rate and the special of a BBQ starting!

Surface Interval

I’d told Charlotte that I would be about an hour to 80 mins and that when they see my yellow SMB launched, I will be on the surface within 10 minutes that would be their cue to start the BBQ warming up. We made garlic chicken and pepper kebabs while the BBQ was warming up. Charlotte made these for my birthday BBQ a month prior to this and they went down a treat.  The burgers went on next – it was great just relaxing, eating and soaking up the sun.

Dive #2

Max Depth : 12.8m
Duration : 52 mins
Log :
This dive was about extending the line laid on the previous dive, ideally in both directions around the quarry so that the two ends were a bit closer to meeting up – but given that I’d started the lines in each direction, I was quite happy just extending one line. My idea was to extend the survey from where I branched to the right, I’ve been that way and I know that there are a lot of cars to tie into which makes it good for surveying.
From the surface you could see the line that I had laid! The viz was good with the water being so cool, but still not gin clear.
It was nice descending and seeing a line to follow as opposed to previous dives such as my very first trip which was very much a case of gingerly progressing and seeing what I come across. So off I toddled along my line and once I came to the branch I turned right - I found my rock that I had tied off to as the extent of this branch, I tied the reel back in and headed off – this edge of the quarry is littered with dozens of cars that have been pushed in so I had no shortage of places to tie off to, but upon later reflection – my line did zig-zag up and down a modest bit so I am wondering about relaying it to be more “through the middle” of the wrecks as opposed to each one in turn ….
I decided that because I got quite cold quite quickly last dive, what I would do is lay all the line (so lots of swimming to keep warm), return to the start point (lots more swimming) and then survey the line, swim-stop-swim-stop…. It turned out that this was actually a far more effective method I think.
The line meandered its way through the piles of cars (which is why WPB, WPC and WPD are quite close) before ultimately terminating at an extremely large tree stump! Easily the size of a small car – I’d love to know how someone managed to uproot THAT (there were a lot of roots, it wasn’t just a log), and get it in the quarry … if it was an entire tree I’d see that maybe it was a landslide .. but just the stump? I had aimed to tie off to a large rock about 20’ past the stump, but had a sudden stop when the reel ran out of line – the most convenient tie off point was the tree stump. So my reel was left with about 20’ of line left!
So now that I’d done the first task of laying the line, I now I had to swim back to the “start” and start the surveys – as I previously said, it was far more effective to do all the surveys in one go I quickly moved from station to station. I learned another lesson, you really need the runs between stations to be a good length (50’ maybe?) so that you can get a good measurement. I noticed that when I had two survey stations (tie offs) separated by about 20’ it was both a bit awkward to survey and it would add very little to the survey as well as probably adding a lot of error to it too.
For this session, I just numbered my surveys 1, 2, 3 etc. but I really should have a more robust scheme – I’m thinking that I might want to try and get some tags / identifiers that I can leave at each survey station so that when I’m in water its more obvious what station I’m at (thinking ahead to caves – if I was surveying a cave with dozens of branches that branched and branched again – this is where this could be more useful).
Having completed my mission of extending the line I had nothing left to do – I was at about 45 minutes of bottom time now so it was time to make an ascent. Like I did on the first dive, I headed into the pit to get the depth and launched the bag and did a very gradual ascent.

Survey Notes

For those that can’t read my writing this is what I wrote – making this little table made me realise that I’ve missed noting some information. Fortunately, I will be returning to Powmill to rip up the line I’ve laid and replace it with line that has been knotted every metre so that I can make far more accurate surveys. I do also think that I’ve noted things down wrongly – a returning trip will help me correct this!!

Waypoint / Survey Station	Depth (m)	Connecting Waypoint	Bearing to WP (degrees)	Distance to WP
Start	3.2	WP1	190	8 arm spans
WP1	3.75	WP2	150	6 arm spans
WP2	5.45	WP3	150	20 kick cycles
WP3	6.0	WP4	150	10 kick cycles
WP4 (Car)	6.9	WP5 (Rock)	120	7 kick cycles
WP4	8.1	WP6	220
WPB	8.7	WPC	200	20 kick cycles
WPC	8.4	WPD	290	6 kick cycles
WPD	6.0	WPE	190
WPE	10.0	WPF	100	7 kick cycles
WPF (Tree Stump)	10.2

That pretty much sums up this trip – I’ve ordered some new line from DIR Direct so my task will be to get that knotted and onto the reel before I am able to return to Powmill. I think I will also buy some more cookies so that I can leave them at each waypoint as a reference for me. Once I’ve made the complete survey I can always pull them out again …