My buddy, Rob, and I have a Malta diving holiday planned where we will be diving at the T1 (GUE Tech 1) level. For about the last three or four years I've basically done no regular diving, little bursts every now and then but that's about it.
Given that we would be doing T1 dives, I wanted to make sure I was ready for it. Rob would be fine, he achieved dive-god status a long time ago! It's also been about 4 years since Rob and I were last together so we thrashed out an idea to meet up at Stoney Cove, Leicestershire for a few days with our other T1 buddy, Mark, to get some diving in to practice skills.
Tuesday
Rob and Mark were travelling from London just 100 miles away from Stoney Cove. I on the other hand was coming 400 miles from Edinburgh, so at 3 pm when my core hours were done I hit the road hard and fast!
The drive was fairly uneventful, I had A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin audio book (the original story for Game of Thrones) to help pass the time. I stopped at Leyland, Preston to see by Brother- and Sister-in-law after four hours of driving.
Hitting the road again I was hit by a twang of nostalgia on the M1 as I saw signs for Loughborough. I stopped at the Harvester restaurant for an evening meal (the same restaurant that my family and I had a meal at the day I moved into university).
After a quick dinner and seeing all the young 18-24 year old students I made a move to cover the last 20 miles to the B&B - arriving at just before 10 pm. We were staying at Willowmead Bed and Breakfast (link). A quick shower and it was bed time.
Wednesday
Being awoken at 5am because the sun was streaming in was painful, but rather than pull the curtains closer, I decided to do the childish thing of rolling over and cuddling the duvet to block the light! And so I got a few more precious hours of sleep until 7 am.
At 730 I opened my bedroom door with bleary eyes only to be pulled by my nostrils by long tendrils of the beautiful ascent of fresh food wafting it's way though the house! Descending into the dining room a bowl of wheatabix was consumed before demolishing a lovely fried breakfast of sausage, baked beans, hash brown, scrambled egg and black pudding! All washed down with a cafetiere of fresh coffee (what a lovely treat compared to instant!). I met an interesting man whom was an archaeologist and we had a good talk over coffee and fried food.
At 830 it was off to the Cove. For those that haven't been to Stoney Cove, the outer gates are usually open, and a road leads down to the Inner Sanctum! I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was car #3 in the queue. This is pleasantly surprising because I've used Stoney Cove as a training venue during my BSAC training at weekends - which can be quite unpleasant because of the sheer number of divers that use the site. But that is not today!
Stoney Cove do offer a loyalty / accelerating system called Diver Log. Using this system means that you don't have to fill in the paper form for each trip. Registering costs £30 but saves you £3 off the entry fee on reach visit. So if you plan on being at the dive centre more than 10 times a year then it's worth getting. You normally pay in cash on the gate to get in, but I often go to the shop and pay on my card. If you are going to be diving over several days, keep the barcoded part of your form, they can scan that to save you the hassle of filling in another the next day.
Parking in the lower car park, the one nearest the water is a pleasant treat and the fight for the good spots begins! Whilst it's tempting to drive straight towards the spots closest to the water, I always hold back a little to park in the spaces that have either a wall on the concrete fence posts at UK that I can use them to get into my rig from a good height.
Starting the epic unload from the car, Mark arrives at about 9am in Eleanor, his Elgrand luxury MPV.
Rob is currently delayed and is somewhere on the M1, to pass the time while we wait, Mark and I unpack and get our gear ready. The weather is overcast but pleasant and before long Rob arrives. Manly hugs are made and we discuss the plan for dive one. During kit up Rob realises there is a problem with his light. Whilst I couldn't find the exact problem to fix it, the problem is with the connection in the robotic cord as in enters the canister lid. Rob, now furious has to dive without a canister light. Just as we start getting in our dry suits, the sun comes out and attempts to fry us.
Dive #1
From the main quay, we descend into about 4m and get settled. Mark turns on his light, no doubt about that, Rob looks sheepish without a light, I pray that my light behaves and with a flick of the switch, I turn to look into the light head and I see that beautiful blue flicker of the arc warning up inside the HID bulb!
Staying on the 6m shelf, Mark leads at a nice casual pace, I put Rob in #2 (technically he should have gone #1 because he didn't have a light, but we were so shallow that our main lights were pretty useless and only good for long range when the bulb was pointed directly at another person to see you) and I go #3 we turn east to head towards the nautilus submarine and to head under the pub.
Moving past here we come across the very small block house, when we came out of the block house there is a small section of foundations where we found a pike.
Continuing onwards Mark leads us to the edge of the 6m shelf and over the edge which takes us all the way down to 21m. The thermocline is at about 15m and is quite considerable! From 12-14 °C at 6m it dropped to about 8 °C at 21m so lots of gas was getting pumped into the suit on the descent! At this point were are about 20 minutes into the dive with an average depth of 6m.
At the bottom we headed roughly south west to find one of the new boats sunk at Stoney Cove. The cockpit roof is removed and there is a hole into the storage areas underneath with a swim through towards the bow. I could see the light from Mark ahead so I knew he could see me coming, but then I see his fins as he has started to drop feet first into the hold. Seeing this I turn back and come out to see Rob hovering. I tell him that there is a clear swim through so he follows after Mark.
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| Mark above the boat |
After a few minutes of swimming around this boat and we head off to the Stanegarth. Undoubtedly Stoney Coves best attraction, it's a large tug sitting up right with the deck at about 19m and the propeller at about 21m.
After swimming through the wreck a few times we leave the wreck from the stern following the anchor chain. At about this time Rob had checked his SPG but because he was wearing his kevlar dry gloves he couldn't reattach it. He called me in and I did it for him and we then swam like mad to catch up with Mark. Because I was #3 I had been out of light range to get his attention! Oops!
We then hit the Wessex helicopter, now looking considerably worse for wear compared to the first time I saw it 8 years ago! Swimming through that and following the wall we came across a transit van.
Continuing along we came across a wall that is near the block house where we did a gentle ascent. At this point we were at about 40 minutes bottom time with an average depth of about 18m (although I thought our average depth was more like 21 so was starting to think I was hitting deco because I was on air) so the ascent up the wall was stopped every 3m as safety stop until we arrived at the 6m shelf.
Heading back along the shelf towards the exit, Rob suddenly swam out ahead and turned around to face me, that's odd, why's he doing that .... Oh crap he's out of air! I donated my long hose to him and went to my back up. Skills were pretty rusty but I managed it correctly with the exception of the routing of the hose compared to the team positioning.
Resetting ourselves after a short swim we made our way to the exit and ascended.
Total runtime : 58 minutes
Interval
During the dive i could feel wetness on my front, it wasn't until i got out i realised the true situation. I'm wet ... Very wet. The day had turned beautiful so I doff the suit and get out of my under suit and leave them in the sun to dry.
Dive #2
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| Drysuit my arse! |
For this dive I was leading and also carrying my Al80 stage. The plan was that I would breathe down the stage then switch to back gas to finish the dive if needed.
Jumping in from the quay we headed west this time descending to the cockpit in 6m. With a twinset and stage there was no chance of being able to get right into the cockpit so I was limited to a straight swim through. Following the quarry road we descended to 21m before turning left to follow the wall along. It was at this point I was reminded about how much drag a stage adds to swimming.
Swimming along this wall we passed over the block foundations of a house, swimming along here was fairly dull, I found a broken up land rover that we did a lap around, it gave me the opportunity to just check on the guys behind me properly before continuing along the wall a bit further until we got the Wessex again.
Swimming just past it we found the wall that we dropped off on the previous dive and it was here Rob launched an SMB and we ascended gradually up the wall feeling the warm embrace as we passed through the thermocline.
Swimming along the 6m shelf along the edge, Rob came to me and told me to go out of gas (OOG) to Mark from the right hand side, while he goes to the left. Catching up to Mark I was a little unfair by going OOG from his side not from the front but he took it well.
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| Descending the wall |
Total runtime : 47 minutes
Interval
Rob was feeling pretty tired after his late night and early start so decided to take a power nap for an hour or so, while Mark and I had a laugh.
During the interval I spent about two hours dealing with the fillers at the gas station trying to get my stage and twinset filled - came away pretty annoyed due to them a) forgetting to fill the twinset with nitrox (filled the stage though) b) then filling the twinset with air not nitrox c) getting pushed to the back of the nitrox fill queue when they finally realised they had cocked up.
Dive #3
This was intended to be a night dive but in the height of summer it wasn't going to get dark until about 10pm.
We ended up doing a surface swim all the way out to the Stanegarth buoy and then dropping straight down onto the Tug. At about 12m the light really started to drop to make it for a pleasantly dark dive at depth - the lights became more prominent.
We did two laps around the Stanegarth, then some swims throughs, on the deck, Mark and I found some kind of clamp, it appeared to not be rusted solid, so we tried seeing if it moved, it did and then we dropped it! It made a horrific bang that resonated throughout the Stanegarth! I do hope no one was inside otherwise they would be truly freaked out by now ...
Leaving the Stanegarth we headed back towards the Wessex and ascended up the wall again.
Total runtime : 47 minutes
That evening, we retired back to the B&B, had a quick wash (well I did because I was soaking!) and went out to a local indian which was fantastic.
Thursday
Staying up til about 1am after a long day of diving meant we were all suffering the next day. We head a lay-in till about 9am and had a wonderful fry up by Barbara once again. Then off to Stoney for Day 2. By the time we had kitted up it was nearly 11am already!Dive #4
We agreed that we should probably take skills a little more seriously so when we dropped down we swam over to a platform and positioned ourselves in the infamous triangle where we would perform a V-Drill, S-Drill and Basic 5 each. Our skills were definitely rusty, but do able because it took us over 20 minutes for the three of us! On any GUE course you have to rattle these out before the start of every dive (except Basic 5) and normally the team can do this is under 10 minutes.
Run time : 50 minutes
Dive #5
The final dive was based on my suggestion. As part of some practice for the dive trip I wanted to have a go with two stages (a bottom stage plus deco bottle), I then wanted to ramp the challenge up one more notch ... the profile didn't require it, but I would treat the two stages as though they are 6 and 21m deco bottles and do switches at the correct depth.
Getting in the water I remembered the previous dive where I found the stage was adding massive amounts of drag, adding a second seemed to amplify the effect a 100x! I was kicking but it felt like I drifted an inch forward and stopped, so I was kicking constantly. Afterwards, Mark said I had absolutely shot down the road so it must have been a perception thing.
The plan was that I would lead the team, Rob as #2 with Mark at the back in #3, past the cockpit and down the slip-road to the hydro-box at 35m. We would then veer off the road and get away from the wall so that we can do a blind ascent i.e. no visual references other than each other.
The swim down was very hard work, I thought I wasn't making any progress. At 33m I veered off the road to the left to get us away from the wall. I started pumping gas into just my wing at this point to get myself neutral as I had been unaware that my hard work was caused by me being far to negative (therefore finning to try and keep up). Getting neutral was a nice relief.
Thumbs up all around, time to head up! Gas in the wing to get the ascent going at a decent speed. The metres are ticking by now... 32, 30, 27, 25 ... signal to start slowing the team down... and we come to a gentle stop at 21m.
I went to signal to Rob to start putting up the bag, he was already doing it. It was at this point I started having my first problem, I couldn't get both Rob and Mark in my field of view simultaneously and it was stressing me a lot, I couldn't even find Mark, he was obviously about somewhere ... It took about 15 minutes for me to resolve that I would just focus on Rob.
Once Rob had the bag sorted, I started the procedure for switching to 50% (21m bottle). I looked down at the stages and I couldn't read my bottle properly so I wasn't a 100% sure which one to go to. I took the one I thought it was and proceeded with the switch. The final step is that you present the reg and bottle to your team, one is marked up for 21m, the other is clearly marked for 6m and full of oxygen. You don't want to make this mistake which is why we have our team involved in the switching process - I looked at Rob and he confirmed the switch. I was switching to the right bottle after all.
I was deco captain so I looked at my bottom timer, we did 5 minutes at 21m and then moved up to 18m for 1 minute. My timer doesn't record in seconds, a massive drawback with the Uwatec, so basically I had to guess how far through a minute we are. Talking with Mark after, who had a timer that could display seconds, I was roughly 30 seconds quick to instruct the move. 30 seconds doesn't sound too bad, but our deco strategy requires precise timing so could cause problems later.
The ascent was flying by until we arrived at 9m. I was probably loading my lungs a bit to keep up with the ascent which was why I was feeling stressed. At 9m I told the team I was switching off my 21m bottle and back onto backgas (the twinset). Upto 6m .... And I bottled it ...
I didn't want to switch to oxygen. I felt like my buoyancy wasn't good enough and that I didn't want to be on o2 and then drop too much. I told the team that I didn't feel good (wavy hand,) I then said I (pointed at my self) no (waving my hand like an angry parent) switch (switch gesture) to my deco bottle (pointed to deco bottle with o2).
We continued the ascent on plan, 5 at 6, 1 at 5, 1 at 4, 1 at 3, 1 at 2 and 1 at 1 followed by a short ascent to the surface.
Breakdown
Five lovely dives after arriving it was time to start breaking up our gear to head to our respective homes. The weather at this point turned beautiful so undersuits (i.e. mine!) were left in the sun to dry while we went to Nemo's Bar (Stoney Cove's own pub) to enjoy dinner and the post-dive beer.
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| Team Photo |
