Vobster Quay – February 2012

Well February has arrived and with it the first official UK club dive day at Vobster. An early start was a bit of a shock to the system but after a few coffees I was awake enough to load up the trusty Landrover and head off to meet Julian and Paul at 6am. After transferring all our kit into Pauls much nicer Landrover we headed off to Vobster. Initial poor weather was replaced by glorious sun as we entered Vobster car park two hours later.

Twelve intrepid (and hardy) divers were soon assembled. Instructors Julian, Paul and Bryan were joined by me, Jacqui, Steve, Roy, Dave W and Kirstin, Malcolm, Alan S and Norman.

bryan

After a round of warming coffees and teas, divers were grouped together according to what they wanted from the day. This included a number of divers needing Dive leader practical exercises as well as a few who wanted to try out dry suits and recently serviced equipment.

For the first dive I was to accompany Julian and Roy with the objective of Roy logging an open water dive and me gaining some dive leading experience and a chance to deploy the DSMB from mid water. Although the water was cold (six degrees) and visibility was quite poor, we managed to carry out a successful dive, exploring the tunnel and having a nice swim around, before carrying out a reasonably successful mid water DSMB deployment .

We returned to the shore for a debrief and bacon and egg sandwiches. All divers seemed to have had good dives with few problems (Unlike last year) and after a suitable surface interval we returned for a second dive.

I stayed diving with Julian and Roy and we descended as before. As we reached our planned depth of 20 meters Roy had a freeflow from his second stage. He indicated a problem to Julian and performed a calm and controlled ascent to the surface. Although he had lost gas, Roy still had a reasonable quantity and was happy to continue the dive. We swam over to a shallower platform, where I took a bearing to the fuselage. We descended, this time with no problems, and successfully navigated over to the fuselage. After swimming around exploring we returned to the platform where I performed a CBL on Roy. I then did a tow with rescue breaths to the shore.

On shore Julian commended Roy for dealing with the freeflow in such a calm way. We met with the others for more food. Jacqui and Steve had performed a number of Dive Leader tasks successfully and everyone seemed pleased with the diving. Jacqui pointed out, quite literally, that she was very cold, but was quickly warmed up by fellow divers!

A great start to the season, it was nice to spend the day diving again and I think we are all looking forward to our first sea dive. Many thanks on behalf of training divers for expert advice and tuition from our three Instructors and to Paul for driving us.