Diving - The adventure continues!
Just Diving - Wrasbury, July/August 2011
Having completed my Enriched Air Course, I wanted to do some general diving to get my experience levels up, especially as I planned to complete my Advanced Open Water qualification on my holiday to Madeira.
Wrasbury Dive Centre has a late night (until 9PM) most (if not every) Wednesday and I went along one evening in search of someone to dive with.
As luck would have it, I was introduced to Mark Anderson, who acted as my buddy.
Mark's a much more experienced diver than me and knows the lake well, as well as been a friendly personable chap, so it was a pleasure to dive with him.
The first time we went out I dived in a wet suit (Semi-dry), but with the water around 20C on the surface that was fine.
On that occassion we dived for almost an hour (Mark uses next to no air, it's remarkable!) before I ran low and explored many of the things sunk in the lake.
Perch are a common sight here
It was quite nice to just dive for the sake of it again, as I'd not done that since my last dives in Egypt and, although the visibility was quite poor, we saw a lot of Perch and some crayfish on our dive.
The following week Mark offered to let me borrow a spare dry suit he had, so I used that.
Mark at the Dive Centre recommended I dive with another couple of kilos over the wet suit and I had no problems with buouancy in the dry suit, which was good.
Again visibilty wasn't great, in places it was really bad, but we saw a lot of fish on this dive, even pausing in a large shoal of Perch at one point; It's amazing how untroubled fish are by scuba divers and Mark found a large Crayfish on of the sunken boats.
Mark Anderson explores one of the wrecks at Wrasbury
We explored the 'far' end of the lake on these dives, furthest from the dive centre buildings and stuck to the edges in the main, where visibilty was better.
I had a couple of moments; once where trying to get a photo I sank to the bottom (We were about 1-2 metres off it at the time) and on the second dive, my weight belt was badly positioned causing me to surface. I lost track of Mark, we both confused another set of divers with each other, but we met up on the surface after a few moments and then continued the dive without problems.
Mark on of the sunken boats at Wrasbury
We even swam through one of the sunken pipes, which was a new experience for me.
Mark hovers over the sunken VW Camper
It was great to do some purely recreational diving and these 3 dives boosted my confidence levels as my buouancy was decent and I feel confident with the equipment now.
Next stop is my PADI Advanced Open Water course in Madeira, if all goes according to plan, but I'll get some more diving in at Wrasbury before it gets too cold.
Read some more of my diving experiences, by clicking the icons below.
