Diving - The adventure continues!
2018 Diving exploits
Over the winter, I finally decided to do what I'd wanted to do for a number of years, namely book myself on a Liveaboard.
This where you spend a week or so on a boat, just travelling from site to site diving. There are liveaboards in the Red Sea, Caribbean and all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but I decided there was one place I really wanted to dive and so I booked 10 days on the Maldives Agressor II in, you guessed it, the Maldives.
Before that, though, I decided to finally get the incessent, but not serious (yet, it had been worse in 2017), leak in my drysuit seen to.
I sent the suit to Seaskin (or Aqualand, they trade as both) in Leeds, on the recommendation of other club members. Geoff, in fact, had his there about the same time as me.
It took over a month to come back, but as this was January into February it wasn't a big problem and, as we suffered a really cold start to March, it was a while before I decided I should try the suit out in a pool session, as a trip, even to Wraysbury, seemed likely to be some way off and my trip to the Maldives was at the beginning of April and I really wanted to do a couple of dives before going.
So, I kitted up and jumped into the pool and swam around for a while. It seemed OK, but when I got out and took the suit off, my trunks were wet! I'm not yet incontinent and this was exactly the same area that got wet before, so the next day I called them up and the suit was soon winging its way back to Leeds, with a promise that it would be prioritised.
After a few days I called them up to be told "We've not had a chance to test it yet", but they promised to test it the next day and get back to me once it was done.
Meanwhile, the more senior divers in our club had been on a bit of a spending spree and those without them had purchased twin sets, with a view to doing more adventurous diving.
I resisted, feeling that we'd probably still mainly do less challenging diving in the club and that, most of the time, 20-30 minutes at 20-30M was probably sufficient, but when I found out that a 4 day "Shipwreck week" was off limits to me because I didn't have a twinset (bottom time was the issue, not depth especially, due to surveying work), I started to look around to see if I could get a twinset setup for a relatively affordable amount, not least because I'd been made redundant about this time, too, albeit with a reasonable settlement and didn't really know what was likely to happen, workwise.
I found a twin 12 cylinder setup for a good price and picked it up from a very nice lady. I needed a wing, backplate and harness setup too and after a bit of looking around, decided I liked the look of the Redhat setup, not least because it offered lots of availability of parts, got some good reviews online and I could be assured of its compatibility.
I intended to leave buying it until mid April, but when I got a 20% off deal from eBay, the opportunity to buy the setup with a substantial discount seemed silly to ignore, so I bought it.
The setup looked well made and was pretty straightforward for an inexperienced twinsetter like me to put together. This also gave me a chance to take a better look at it all and I also cobbled together two sets of regs from my older set and the set from pony cylinder.
Before I got the chance to try it out though, I set off for the big diving adventure of 2018.
My drysuit had come back and seemed to be water tight (enough!) in the pool, but with some dreadful weather, I'd not had any opportunity to dive in the UK, so my first dives since November 2017 would be there, but I wasn't unduly concerned as I'd done a fair few dives over the years now and I'd had no problem with equipment or myself in the pool.
Needless to say I was excited!
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