Malta Holiday 2015 - Day 6

Morning

Rob and I were once again up at 7am, fed, watered and walking to Techwise for 8am so that we could dive the Gozo wrecks. Once again we stopped at the coffee bar for coffee.

Arriving at Techwise, we find the plan has changed slightly and we will be taking the rib from Marfa and diving the Karwella only. I didn't really have a problem with this, doing only one dive kept the bill down but also we would be spending all of the bottom time on just one wreck, the way I saw this was win-win.

Analysing gas and loading up truck done we relaxed. Lee Stevens would be our guide and chauffeur today. Diving to Marfa was pleasantly refreshing being driven by a relatively cautious British driver rather a scary Malteser (Steve 'scary' Sherry).

Steve arrived in the rib, we loaded up and started the horrifically long journey to the Karwella. I say horrifically long because it was 15 minutes.

5 minute warning and I got fins on and started getting into my rig. We got a delayed entry because Steve managed to get the shot line wrapped on the propeller. Eventually, stages were attached and Rob and I rolled in. 

You can read all about the dive here.

Post-Dive

On the way back, we stopped off at an ice-cream van for some delicious ice-cream to mellow out in the last of the sun.

Returning to Techwise, we started the depressing strip down and thorough rinse. Since Rob was flying home tomorrow he really needed to get his kit dry for the return flight. I copied the video of the Karwela off the GoPro into my SSD to watch at home later.

With kit hung and drying, we went to Huggins for the mandatory deco beer and lunch to kill a few hours for the kit to dry and Viv to finalise our bills.

Oh the dreaded bill ... By the end of our trip, we had done 5 trimix dives, with reasonable decompression obligations, including a return airport transfer as well, the bill was €540 / £390. If you deduct the €40 for airport transfers the bill was €500 / £360. At £60 per tech dive on average that's not too bad given that they were almost all 25/25 trimix with 50% deco dives with typically 30 minutes bottom time, with transport and boats. So I'm happy with that, as a tip, it works out quite economical to do a deep trimix dive in the morning, followed by a shallower dive in the afternoon which has only been air-topped (this was what we did on our first day in fact) - that way you get two trimix dives in for the cost of the trimix fill plus a small air-top (or other top-off).

Viv had some team members available so she kindly offered Juan to give us a lift back to the apartment.

Back at the apartment, Rob and I got our gear out on the balcony to dry off in the sun.

Charlotte and I were heading out for dinner to meet up with a good friend of mine called Vasi. I met Vasi two years ago, not far off to the day, when she took me to Zurrieq to dive the Faroud. We had dinner at Cuba Bistro in St Paul's Bay. Rob later joined us after our starter.

After a lovely night with Vas, we started our walk home