Diving - My Continuing Adventures underwater
Normal service is resumed - Back in UK waters
I thought it was time to get back into my drysuit and some cold water and so, on the 1st March, I headed to Wraysbury with Ria (trying out her new drysuit) and James (logging dives to meet the minimum for his Red Sea liveaboard in September).
It was a gloomy day and Wraysbury was quite busy (Caroline had been the day before and found it very quiet), so we dropped in from the car park pier.
Vis was mixed, in places it was excellent, but in others near zero.
After 25C dives, even in my Hunter drysuit (worn because it's thicker than my Seaskin) it felt chilly at 6-8C, but we managed a 45 minute dive.
We went to the lifeboat, swam through it and then headed along towards the shipwreck graveyard.
On the container nearby, we spotted 7 or 8 of the big Carp, the most I recall seeing and the vis around the wrecks was very good.
We headed what I though was back towards the nearby bank, but eventually found ourselves at the 'cave complex'. Vis here, unusually, was very poor and we lost Ria briefly.
She indicated she was cold and we started heading back, but it seemed to take forever to see anything I recognised, which was the pit (we didn't go in today).
Finally, we surfaced and had a short swim back to the pier in the car park.
We planned a short second dive after bacon sandwiches and warming up, but I didn't seat the wrist seal on my right arm properly and was quickly feeling the arm filling up.
We tried to find the plane, but the vis had worsened significantly over the first dive and we didn't find it.
We spent a lot of time looking at bare lakebed and I don't recall what we saw, a few small boat wrecks seem familiar.
After 20 minutes or so we reached the diving bell and, as I was now getting wet and cold, I thumbed the dive at that point.
It was nice to be back in the water, but I can't say I greatly enjoyed the cold!
