Trip Report : The Slates

Early Start

On Thursday 16th my dive squad and I met up at a pub for a social get-together, whilst there (because all good plans are made over a beer), we decided that on Sunday we will do a dive in a place known as The Slates.


So Sunday morning, well 5am if that counts as morning, arrived and was up cooking my infamous cinnamon pancakes for breakfast before I left to pick Steven up from Rosyth. Once we had Steven and his rebreather in the boot we headed up the motorway to the Kinross Park and Ride to await the rest of the Renegades in the car park. Eventually the team assembled, we had Stewart, Peter, Steve N, Steve H and Dave. So the motley crew was assembled and ready so we started the long drive. We headed north up to Perth before cutting across country.

We stopped at a brilliant service station called the Green Welly (http://www.thegreenwellystop.co.uk/). The Green Welly has a massive gift shop, but the primary reason for our stop was for breakfast, they do a brilliant fry up, just what the doctor ordered after a 530am start!!!


With food in our belly's we headed off once again. The dive site was located in the town of Ballaculish just behind some houses. There are two dives here, the dive we did was down this slip way and into the Loch. The alternative is around the other side requiring a big jump in from a pier

Nice panaroma

I was diving with Steven. Steven is a really good diver and a great guy, I really get on well with him, but he does get bothered fairly easily, like me I don’t think he likes to be rushed and stressed more than necessary, which suits me because it means we can take our time.

On my previous dives to Conger Alley I was using my twinset with a stage because I wanted to do a trimix dive, on that dive I discovered my stage was leaking. At the time I thought it was just that I hadn’t screwed the first stage down properly, but after some investigations I discovered that the leak is actually coming from the valve.

What's wrong with this picture?

The stage has 160 bar of 50% left in it, and it was leaking, so I didn’t feel comfortable doing a deco dive with my kit not at 100%, so the plan for today was to breathe the stage down (getting the valve repaired means that the gas would be blown off, so I might as well at least get SOME dive time out of it) and then switch back to my twinset for the last 10 minutes or so of the dive.

The Dive

Steven and I entered the Loch from down the slip way as seen in the above picture. The entrance of the Loch has lots of seaweed so it does take a bit of working through. I got in the water first, but had a lot of faffing to get my stage clipped off how I like it.

By this time Steven was ready so we dropped down. Steve lead. We headed off to the right, at this point I was breathing my back gas with the stage stowed. After about 3-4 minutes we found a clearing, Steven wanted to do some skills and I wanted to switch to my stage. So I deployed my reg and opened the valve and as expected gas came pouring out, but crickey it was far louder than I expected!!!

After floating for only 30 seconds the noise was annoying me, so I tried winding back the valve. I was thinking that if the valve allows enough gas to flow so that between breaths the hose fills up again ready for the next one then that's OK.

This worked for while I was just resting and floating, but once I had to start swimming and doing something once Steven had finished his drills I found that the valve was mostly open to meet my gas demands. So that idea didn’t work.

We swam along and then dropped over a sloping ledge down to 18m. I was on 50% so I didn’t want to go any where near 21m so I was happy with this depth. Swimming along at this depth we cam across several pieces of scrap piping that had been thrown in the Loch. We were trying to work out what it could have been. The pipe was only about 1” but it was flexible, but clearly metal, so quite likely to be copper.

Continuing along the ledge and slowly working our way up we came across many underwater plants and sea life. There were a few star fish, plus starfish that had about 10 legs! The water was actually very clear, somewhere between 5 and 10m visibility! The water was 4 degrees however!!
With my limited flow valve not meeting my needs, but being annoyed by the noise of the bubbles when enough gas is being delivered, I changed tack – I would feather the valve, so whilst I was inhaling the valve was partially open and while I was “holding” my breath and exhaling I would have the valve closed and only open it a second before I needed to breathe. This meant that almost no gas was being wasted, but it was effort. Certainly a great technique to get far more mileage out of a leaky tank. If you were on deco this wouldn’t have been so difficult because I as trying to swim at the same time, I had lost about 40 bar of gas in about 10 minutes when I wasn’t feathering the valve, after this the gas consumption was much less.

There isn’t much more to report, we continued swimming steadily, once my stage SPG was reading about 10 bar I switched off it and back to back gas. Whilst re-stowing the stage reg hose I realised how buoyant the Al80 was now that it was empty – I had under estimated and now struggling. The Al80 was probably a good 2kg buoyant now.

I had the horrible feeling of having to fight to stay down, I had an empty stage and low twinset and making a steady ascent, a bad combination of niggles. And I was definitely struggling and getting very stressed. We got to about 3-4m and we called the dive preferring to surface now as I had had enough with trying to stay down.

We surfaced having done a 45 minute dive, max depth 18m.

I only wanted to do one dive today, so whilst the rest of the guys were diving again, I went and took some pictures of the area, the scenery and views are simply stunning!

On the way back I managed to get a picture from the far end of the Loch