auchmeddan

Jules has started Dive Master training, and as a result is having to study/work at the weekends when she gets the opportunity which leaves me without my Dive Buddy. It’s kinda weird for me, as we have always dived together.

This weekend was also the first time taking out my new toy, the DC500 underwater camera. I took it out Saturday and it completely failed to perform! Once I got it home it told me the battery was low. I supposed it must have been turned on somehow in the bag and drained the battery, but I would have expected an auto shutdown after a few mins of inactivity. It was very unfortunate, as we dived the Marie Celeste on Saturday and saw several very large black Grouper. They would have been great for photography!

The conditions were also pretty rough Saturday, with lots of swell on the surface and some decent current on the first dive. The afternoon was even worse than the morning, and there were quite a few people suffering from seasickness. Amazingly, I was not one of them.

Sunday was my first day diving without Jules. I went out with Eric and Tina and acted as their dive guide. If you knew how little attention I usually pay to navigation, you would realise how funny that is!
Fortunately, the first dive was on the Lartington. It’s a very easy wreck to navigate.

As soon as we got off the boat (I raced to get off first) we went down and I headed straight for the bow. I had a good look inside and was a little disappointed that the Lion Fish wasn’t there. We went on a tour of the wreck, and then I headed back to the bow again near the end of the dive.
This time when I stuck my head in to look for him, I almost head-butted it as it was hanging on the wall right over the entrance. Oops! Eric and Tina were able to see him before he swam back into his little chamber off in the side.

On the way back, I spotted a Graysby and Coney resting near a small rocky overhang low down in the sand. As I got close the Graysby moved off, but the coney wasn’t keen to budge, which made me hopeful there was an eel in there. After I stuck my head down for a look I saw something pull back a little into it’s hiding place, and after a moment realised that I was looking at a well camouflaged octopus, hanging upside down under the ledge. I snapped a couple of photos, and was just lining up for my 3rd photo when the Coney came back and “road blocked” the entrance. I guess he felt I had harassed his hunting partner enough, so he played his body between me and the hole, and rested his fin on a rock for balance. I snapped a couple of photos of him, and if you look carefully at the picture below you can see the eye of the octopus directly above the Coney’s eye.

I got a little lost on the 2nd dive at the Constellation, but recovered in time to get us back to the boat with 10 minutes of the dive left. We did spend a lot longer on the reef than I intended, but at least we got to see a 15 strong pack of Barracuda cruising around.

Jules is training again next weekend, so I’m diving with Tina. Hopefully Jules will be able to join us again soon.

Well, there was no hurricane. Nate was downgraded to a Tropical Storm, and we saw some wind and some heavy rain. And that was that.

Over last weekend we got in 3 dives and finished our Rescue Course. The highlight of the dives were the Smooth Trunkfish (we saw them on every dive) and the Moray Eel I spotted on the Darlington. I may never have noticed it if it hadn’t been for it’s 3 Coney bodyguards I first caught sight of it slipping over the reef and down under a rock.

We hung for a while and watched the little guy breathe (he was about 18 inches long) while the Coneys gave us dirty looks. They obviously wanted to get back to hunting with it.

The Rescue course wrapped up on Sunday, and Ondrej used Vlad’s camera to take some photos, which are up on his website. In between sessions I took off my mask, and managed to catch a tiny little Sergeant major in it. Ondrej managed to get a photo which, although it is a little out of focus, shows how small the little fella was.

Jules has now signed up for the DiveMaster course, which will take quite a bit of time to complete. Jules has been studying books the last 3 evenings, preparing for her first pool session tomorrow.

Oh, I almost forgot. Before we went out diving I was hanging my feet in the water off the back off the dive boat’s swim platform down at the dive shop in Somerset. After a few moments a Scrawled Cowfish came up to investigate my feet. I found wiggling my toes would sometimes draw him or his partner back. I was telling Jules about it a few minutes later, and dipped my feet back in the water. Sure enough, he came back up almost immediately, but this time he moved closer and closer to my foot, his mouth opening and closing all the time. I moved my foot to protect my little toe (as it was obviously what he was aiming for) and he moved in and nibbled the side of my foot. He was quite intent to get me, so much so that his horns were out of the water when he bit! It was a weird feeling, as the mouth is big enough that I could feet a bit of my skin inside it. It was quite a funny sight….wish I’d had the sense to have my camera close at hand.

Got held up at work tonight working on a laptop which was running the WinXP User Interface in Italian. As I couldn’t change the UI to English (it’s XP home) I had to rely on Icons and good guesses…it was kinda fun. I wouldn’t usually mess around with a home users laptop, but I was at a loose end at the end of the day and really couldn’t resist the challenge of troubleshooting software problems in a foreign language. I even learned to read a little Italian to boot! (no pun intended).

As I drove the bike home I could feel the wind had picked up a little, but nothing all that bad yet. When I reached the gas station down the road from us I had to laugh - people are already filling their cars in panic. The station had at least 20 cars in it, and there is only 4 pumps! Cars were blocking each other in all over the place, and I’m not sure how anybody was going to get back out.

Jules and myself are a bit more relaxed about NATE. We have done the sensible stuff like stow our patio furniture and BBQ away safely, and have closed the storm shutters over the patio doors. We have some canned food, tons of chips, plenty of soft drinks and beer (thanks Jules!) and Jules has cooked some meals we can easily heat over the BBQ should we need to.
Hmmm..it sounds more like planning a party than preparing for a storm!

To put things in perspective, NATE is currently only a Tropical Storm that is likely to hit us worst around 16:00 on Thursday 8th Sept. It means tomorrow won’t be pretty, and may turn into a Category 1 Hurricane, but it’s not exactly “The Day After Tomorrow” either. We lost all power island wide in July and everyone started panic buying then as well…and it was a total waste of time.

Of course, I could be wrong. NATE could turn into a Hurricane, and could decide to concentrate all it’s efforts on our only (already damaged) power plant, and could knock power out for days. I really doubt it though. I still think we’ll be out diving this weekend.

If you want to see how the storm is tracking, go to Shark Oil and use the Animated Storm Tracker option.

Went out with Blue Water Divers (as usual) and got to a new dive site (Badlands) on the Monday holiday and had a very good time. I really wasn’t feeling well when I got up in the morning, but am glad I went out. The ocean was flat, the sun was shining, and the reef was beautiful and full of life. Visibility was probably around 60-80ft. Jules Nav’d the site well and we had a nice, relaxing, fun dive. We also dived the wreck of L’Herminie in the morning, and I started to have camera problems - the camera got a bit warm and the lens port fogged up. This problem followed me into the afternoon, and it’s really my own fault for using the camera to shoot video instead of stills as this has happened before.

We got back out to Badlands in the afternoon and Jules guided Eric and Tina around as well. This was our first dive together since they passed their “Open Water” course, and they really enjoyed the site and were pretty good on air consumption. It was a great way to spend a Monday.

There are a couple of pics below of a cannon from the L’Herminie and a Smooth Trunkfish we saw at Badlands.

Now, about that hurricane….

Hurricane Nate is supposed to hit us in the wee hours of Friday morning and it’s tracking pretty close to a direct hit, so I hope this isn’t a re-run of Fabian from 2003 when it decided to turn and go right over us. I’m a bit annoyed with Nate, as it may ruin our plans for this weekend. We really want to dive on Saturday and finish our Rescue course Sunday. Nate could get in the way of this, but we’re not going to stand for it! We’ve decided the Hurricane can just go and (insert your favourite expletive here) and go dissipate somewhere else. It’s not ruining our weekend, we’re not going to let it!

On a more serious note, considering we lost all power island wide for over a day in July due to a fire at Belco, I’m hopeful that the hurricane won’t cause any further damage to the power plant. That would suck.

To start, I’ll put up a couple of photos of the octopus we saw on Thursday night at Elbow Beach. When I first saw the Octo, it was blue (which I am told means happy). Then he turned a sandy white colour and tried to camouflage himself against the sand, and finally a red/orange colour to show he was not quite so happy anymore. At that point I stopped taking photos and left him alone, and felt a wee bit guilty for ruining his mood.

This was the 3rd day of our Rescue Diver course and was a lot of fun, concentrated mostly on missing diver scenarios. We tried location and recovery using 2 methods today - line and reel, and expanding square. If it’s possible, the visibility at Wyndham was even worse today than before as I was finding it hard to even see my outstretched hand! In a team with Jules and Johann though, I’m happy to say we did find and “rescue” our missing divers. For fun, Ondrej also had the missing divers all have some sort of problem we had to deal with as well.

So far, I’m really enjoying this course, and I think the awful visibility at Wyndham actually helped today as we really had to rely on our compass and kick counts to do the square and find the divers. This is a PADI course I would definitely recommend. I’m not saying I feel ready to Rescue anyone in a real situation as you never really know how you will react until something happens, but at least I feel I am learning skills that will be useful and could make a difference.

The real shock is that on the expanding square I was navigating and we actually found them! This is a major surprise as I almost never do any NAV as I tend to concentrate on photos and leave the nav to Jules.

This is a good course, and we’re lucky to be doing it with good people.

We finished our “Night Diving Specialty” course on Thursday night. There really wasn’t much to it if you are already comfortable diving in the dark. The conditions were not ideal though, with reasonably big surf breaking, and constant surge under the water. We finally found an octopus at the end of the dive, which was the highlight.

On the way back out, I was knocked over by a wave and end up sitting on my arse in about a foot of water waiting for the next wave to come and slap me. My fins are really not very user friendly to take off in that sort of situation…well, at least not when you are holding a camera in one hand. I got knocked over a few times until Jules took my camera off me, and I was able to put my hand down to get up.

We ended the night with a couple of beers (for me) and a chat to a motorcycle speed-freak called Eric who was on the course with us, even though he’d clocked about 150 night dives.

In conditions like that I probably would not take my camera out again as the surf was not very kind to it. It didn’t leak, but the amount of sand I found wedged against the O-rings after I opened it was a little worrying. I’ve cleaned it once, but will check and clean it again tomorrow.

We started day 2 of our Rescue Diver course today and did some panicked and unresponsive diver skills below and on top of the water. We had some fun with water exits (carrying unresponsive or weak divers out of the water) and ran through towing a unresponsive diver, removing the gear from both of you, and getting them out of the water all while providing rescue breathing. Very good skills to learn, and pretty enjoyable.

I got picked on a couple of times today though. Once, while running through panicked diver skills underwater, Ondrej sneaked up behind me and turned off my air. It took a couple of breaths before my Regulator ceased working, and at that point I decided to do a Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent(CESA) to the surface. A CESA is swimming up slowly to the surface while blowing bubbles out the whole time(to avoid lung overexpansion injuries). I did it as we were only in about 10ft of water, and it was an easy CESA to make. In reality though, proper procedure would have been to signal “out of air” and get Jules Octopus to breath from but as we were shallow it seemed quicker to CESA. “Out of Air” isn’t something I’d like to experience deep, when I’d definitely need to secure Jules Octopus. It was a good lesson for both of us.

The Second time I got picked on left me with a large bump on my head. I was bent over putting my gear on when Jules picked up her BCD and Tank and swung it over her shoulder. She hit me right in the head with her First-stage or tank (I’m not sure which) and it really bloody hurt! I cursed her out (of course) for not looking around before swinging her tank blindly over her shoulder and I hope she’s learned something from it and will be more careful in future, but I’m not convinced. I may start wearing a football helmet around her

Who knows what injuries I’ll end up with on day Three? As long as no-one partially drowns me, I think I’ll be OK.