Dives
I've made this page so that you can read about some of the dives I do. If I do a dive that I think would be interesting then I'll put it here. Currently here are:
Friday 9 May 1997, with Oliver Keating - previously undived site
Fri, 09 May, 1997 - Oli & Cby PPPadi:
First of all, I feel obliged to tell you that many of the procedures we used would be conisdered as unsafe diving practices in the recreational, professional, technical, military and commercial diving communities.
A few weeks beforehand, Oli and I decided that we should go and dive a particular site which had never been dived before. We thought that this would be a notably interesting dive that would require us to use altered diving procedures. On Thursday 8 May, we decided that we ought to go ahead and do this dive. On Friday afternoon we collected our equipment and made our way to the dive site. Our club had a trip planned too, but as the sea-state was 4-6, they called it off - this meant that several people were very disappointed, but not us!
We had visited the area many times before, and it wasn't far from where Oli lives. We had checked out the site, and found that it was densly populated with fish and plant life. We also noticed a large amount of net floating around on the surface. We could see that the visibility was going to be bad, and we knew that it could be stirred up and worsened very easily. There wouldn't be much room to move around in the restricting environment that we were intending to dive so we had to streamline our kit. We did the dive on Nitrox79/21 (sort of). We assembled our sets and sliped into our exposure-suits. Not forgetting to bring several cans of Diet Coke, we proceeded to the water's edge.
Here's a list of most of the unsafe practices we followed:
We didn't have full approval from our D.O. (Diving Officer).
We didn't plan the dive properly.
We didn't conduct a buddy check.
Oli didn't wear a buoyancy compesator (but I wore a drysuit).
I wore inadequate insulation (I only had a thin shirt under my crushed neoprene drysuit, and didn't wear gloves or a hood).
We were very tired.
We didn't carry any form of alternative air source.
We had no surface support or cover.
We didn't wear fins.
We didn't carry a knife, pair of shears or line cutter.
We didn't monitor our depth, time or air.
We didn't check the decompression tables or wear a computer.
We didn't plan how much air we'd need.
We had very rapid ascents.
We had multiple sawtooth profiles.
We didn't carry torches.
We lifted rocks without lifting bags
We had no lines, reels or SMBs.
We had no signalling devices.
We had no redundant systems of any form.
We had no first aid kit, or oxygen kit available.
We surfaced with almost 0 bar of air.
Oli entered the water, without his aqualung set, to have a little splash about. He then came out and I put on my backpack and spat in my mask. I entered the water and immediately started feeling cold. It was 17:06 when I went down to check out the site. The visibility was literally zero, I couldn't see my watch, let alone read it - even with my wrist right up to my face. I could feel the slimy plants sweeping past my ungloved hands. I surfaced pretty rapidly to meet Oli who was in the water putting on his backpack. We went back down and swam around for a while. We collected some rocks and plants and brought them back to the surface. We got out of the water, and spent some time at the surface. We had some more Diet Coke and went to the toilet, etc. We did about four dives, terminating operations at 21:04. On the last dive we played a little game: it was zero vis so it was more interesting. We went down and did things like turn each other's air off, and ditch weightbelts at the bottom. When we finished, our gauges read 0 bar.
All-in-all we had a good time, and after the last dive we went straight to the steam-room to wind-down. We're thinking of doing this dive again sometime, possibly next week even.
If you're interested in diving this site you'll have to talk to Oli, the 1.6m (5.3ft) deep pond is in his back-garden. It is an interesting dive with a plastic bottom composition and many carp (fish) to see.
Some people heard this and thought it was made-up, but we did actually do it. This article was written in May '97 and we did dive it again, but don't worry, we do real diving too.
Written by Andrew --Cby PPPadi-- Pugsley
E-mail: diver@ukgateway.net