Diving - The adventure continues!
Diving off Weymouth, September 24th 2011
Diving - 24th September 2011.
My occasional dive buddy Mark Anderson dropped me a mail and wondered if I fancied joining a dive on the wreck of the Pomeranian, a merchant ship sunk in WW1 off of Portland.
I jumped at the chance for a number of reasons. Firstly, Mark's a great dive buddy, secondly I was keen to experience sea diving in the UK before the winter really set in and finally I'd had a bit of a windfall and had purchased most of my own dive equipment.
I was now the proud owner of a Mares BCD, Scubapro regs and a nice secondhand drysuit. All I didn't now have was my own air tanks.
I arranged with a dive centre in Weymouth (Old Harbour Dive Centre) to rent tanks for the two dives of the day from the "Tango" (tangoofweymouth.co.uk) and stayed the previous evening with my parents who live in East Dorset, cutting my morning drive to Weymouth down to a leisurely hour.
I arrived and parked up on one side of the harbour and popped into the first cafe I found for a cup of tea, a comfort break and a chance to get my bearings, find the dive centre and the boat.
As it turned out I was only yards from both, but the dive centre was on one side harbour and the boat (and I) on the other.
So, I drove around Weymouth's rather convoluted one way system and got within 50 yards or so of the dive centre.
Fortunately, all was fine and after 10 minutes or so, I had a 15l cylinder of air and one of 36% Nitrox squeezed into the boot of my car and the rest of the gear scattered around the cabin (If you're planning on doing a lot of Scuba diving, an RX8 is probably not the ideal car for you!)
I returned to the boat-side and found the Tango where the skipper told me to park up alongside (on yellow lines) to unload. I did this without problem and purchased a car park ticket from him for a nearby car park.
After grabbing some lunch from the Co-Op we we're off out of the harbour and down Portland Bill under a clear blue sky.
The journey out took about 1.5 hours, which gave us plenty of time to assemble our gear and chat with fellow divers and the friendly skipper.
I was a little apprehensive (concerned would be far too strong) about the new-ness of all my equipment, but I needn't have worried as it all worked excellently.
When we arrived around the site of the Pomeranian, the skipper deployed a shot line (I guess he used GPS to find the wreck location?) and dropped us into the water a buddy-pair at a time, circling around to the buoy marking the line each time.
We quickly reached the line and Mark gave the thumbs down for descend, but a few metres down I found I couldn't descend any further... I tried to swim down, not the best idea, but as I did, I could feel myself being pulled around.
After a moment or two of thought I decided I must be caught on something and so it proved to be. A line running at right angles to the shotline had somehow caught somewhere on my back. A bit of manouevring quickly cleared it and I was free to descend smoothly.
Initially, the water seemed disappointingly cloudy, but as we dropped the last few metres the skeletal deck of the of Pomeranian became crystal clear, although I found it rather hard to picture what I was looking at. I mentioned this to Mark, who's a marine engineer, after the dive and he agreed that it wasn't easy to work out what the structure we dived onto was, so I guess the ravages of time had as much of a part to play in that as my inexperience with wrecks.
The Pomeranian is at around 34M, so there wasn't much chance of us spending a long time on the wreck and I don't believe we reached either end or side of the deck beneath us.
The water was a near emerald green, but very clear with excellent visibility of the other divers and a lot of fish life on the wreck. Mark found a large crab that he tried to liberate, but the crustacean had no intention of giving up his wreck home for a short life in a pot!
I was impressed by the size of some of the fish swimming around, including a huge white fish hiding in the wreck whose head briefly poked out from time to time. His head was shaped not unlike the Groupers I'd seen in Madeira, but I've not yet been able to determine what the various fish I saw were.
My NDL was being reached even though we started to swim gently up and so we headed for the surface, Mark deploying a SMB as we went so that the Tango could see us as we surfaced.
After a 5M safety stop, we surfaced and the Tango came around. We grabbed the ropes hanging from the starboard side and hauled ourselves around to the stern where a rather civilised lift raised us effortlessly back onto the deck; no slippery ladder to end our dive today!
When we'd collected everyone, tea and hot cross buns arrived and we dekitted and relaxed in the unseasonably warm sunshine!
The next hour or so was spent heading back towards Weymouth, chatting about the Pomeranian, the great visibility and diving in general. I found that three other divers on board were from the RAF base at Odiham, near my home, and we all knew an acquaintance of mine from his RAF days. We also swapped to our second tanks for a drift dive we were to undertake near Portland's harbour breakwater.
I was nice and dry in my new dry suit, but although the water had only reported as low as 16C I felt quite cold when it clouded over.
Eventually we stopped and the boat dropped us all off, close to the eastern edge of Portland south of the breakwater.
I'd done a 'drift dive' in Egypt, but there you did just that, drift. I was quite taken aback by the speed of the current as we dropped to the 22m or so sandy seabed.
Mark had told me how to spot Scallops, but I could only see the ones he pointed out as we rushed a few inches above the seabed. I spotted a few crabs, but this was a fairly desolate spot. By the end of the dive he had a reasonable haul of Scallops and some of the other divers had come up with a couple of crabs.
Oddly, I felt quite cold during this dive and kept pumping air into my drysuit mistaking, I think, the chill for squeeze from my suit. This caused my feet to get too much air in and I had to carry out the tuck to redistribute the air into my suit and then vent it out. All this meant that I was using air quicker than I had on the wreck dive another 10m down and we had to come up after 35 minutes as I was on the margins of air availability.
Back on the boat, I found myself shivering uncontrollably, even though I was dry and it was only after changing into my clothes, drinking a mug of tea and sitting in the warm cabin for a while that I began to feel warm again.
We unloaded the boat into our cars and said our goodbyes. I returned my tanks to Old Harbour Dive centre and set off back along the A35 in the evening sunshine.
A great day's diving, slightly spoilt by my rather high air consumption on the second dive, but I suspect a few factors came into play there, not least of all my feeling of cold, so I guess I need to invest in an undersuit for my drysuit before I dive in UK seas again.
However, my BCD, regs and drysuit had all performed faultlessly and I'd got a couple of UK sea dives under my (redundant, with integrated weights in my BCD) belt, which felt good.
I'd been lucky with the weather again, but I'm not complaining - Diving is supposed to be fun after all!
I didn't take my camera this time as someone had suggested it might be part of the cause of my high air consumption
Since Weymouth I've also carried out a PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy course at my favourite muddy hole, Wrasbury and joined my local BSAC club, Scuba Dolphins (based in Farnborough Hants) and started to train for my BSAC Sport Diver qualification. The main reasons for joining the club were to get some dive time in over the winter months (They dive at Farnborough pool each Tuesday, so it's just a chance to work on buoyancy and technique, but useful nonetheless) and find some more like minded people to dive with.
I have had a PADI Wreck Diving course blown out a couple of times in the Plymouth area and currently HMS Scylla has nets on it preventing diving, so hopefully I will get to do that in the next couple of months and I have booked a dive with the club at Poole on the 14th April.
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