A very belated
report on Steve and Jacqui’s first open water dive at the Mulberries
on 30th May with dive leader Andrew Hubbard and his lovely assistant
Debbie McGee, AKA Jenny.
With just four
of us on the very spacious boat meant that we would only be doing one
dive each on what turned out to be a very warm early summer’s day.
Andrew and Jenny had preplanned that Steve would dive first with Andrew
as his buddy. It turned out that this was an inspired plan.
Jacqui and
Jenny were second in and their 45 minute dive enabled Steve to savour
the rolling ocean and provide more than adequate nourishment to the fish
life! It is not clear if Steve would have been able to dive second, but
he assures us that it would not have been a problem, yeah right!
The vis was
actually very good, which made our first dive a memorable one. We were
both introduced to the conger with it’s wild staring eye and funny
idea of an introductory hand shake with it’s gaping jaw!
If Andrew
pointed out the protruding steel reinforcement bars from the ‘wreck’
in the briefing once, he said it a hundred times! Oh and he pointed to
each bar under the water, as though they were long lost friends!
We were all
fortunate to see a fantastic cuttle fish hovering close to us on each of
our dives. Steve and Andrew saw a decent sized shark, oh alright then
dogfish. The girls saw a good size lobster and a squat lobster.
Andrew and
Jenny were pleasantly surprised to see more fish life than even they had
been expecting. Jenny
donned her fish life anorak after and named all the fish we had seen. We
have to admit that Colin was our favourite.
Anemones, dead
man’s fingers and other such sea life were apparent as we strived to
dodge the reinforcement bars, armed with our new torches, except for
Jacqui who left hers on the boat!
Apart from a
very boring dive in the Maldives last year this was our first serious
open water dive and frankly we were disappointed. In all seriousness we
were ecstatic, enjoying every minute (except for Steve’s fish feeding
half an hour) and can’t wait for the next dive when we are looking
forward to going even deeper than the twelve metres we experienced at
Mulberries.
A big thanks
to Andrew and Jenny for being our first! To Andrew for teaching us the
fundamentals in the pool, to Jenny for man handling Steve out of the
water (bonus for him), to Tracy for helping us through the theory, to
Bryan for loaning Steve the leaky dry suit! And for his unique brand of
theory training when Tracy was away, or merely hiding in their loft
extension if she saw us arriving in time. A special thank you to Julian
for loaning Jacqui his dry suit that doesn’t leak!
And some
serious stuff. Jacqui allegedly being the more advanced diver than
Steve, doing mask removal and demand valve clearing, but forgetting the
rate of ascent for the last five metres, compared to Steve’s gradual
ascent taking one minute!!
