Diving, running, sailing, travel… and stuff

Gaius' Adventures

Posted on August 3, 2024 by Gaius

Why the Beacons Way?

Fitness & Freshness

Posted on November 9, 2018 by Gaius

There’s a premium Strava feature called Fitness & Freshness that I am a little addicted to. I love seeing the chart shoot up after a hard workout, and I fret when I see it coming back down again. But when you think about it, this makes no sense at all. Everyone knows, you don’t get stronger or fitter in training but in recovery. Infact you could even say that the entire purpose of training is to trigger the body going into a recovery mode where it overcompensates and that’s how gains occur. But F&F shows the uptick immediately on completing the session, and then it starts to go down the next day, but after a hard session it’s on the next day and the day after that the benefits start to materialise, biologically.

Secondly according to F&F right now I am the fittest I have ever been since starting to use Strava and honestly… I’m just not.

Northern Lights, September 2018

Posted on September 9, 2018 by Gaius

I had previously seen the Northern Lights in Sweden in Winter 2004 on a trip dogsledding between log cabins before arriving at the Ice Hotel. That was a spectacular display; directly overhead and almost bright enough to read by! But I was mostly shooting Kodak Tri-X at the time so I didn’t take any photos. I might dig out some of the others from that trip and post them on here sometime. But on the most recent trip to Iceland, on the East coast, we were lucky enough to see them again

Mostly 4 second exposures, ƒ/2.8, ISO 4000 if I remember correctly. Settings tested at Aurora Reykjavik beforehand! Where we also learnt about Kp index and other useful facts. Readers of my other blog will see that this is ripe for modelling with a 1D RNN 🙂

Silfra, August 2018

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Gaius

Some friends of ours had dived Silfra and told us, it’s only two twenty-minute dives, and the rental drysuits leak, and you’re in a huge group, but I am happy to report that it was nothing like this with dive.is. The drysuits really were dry, we dived for 30 and 35 minutes, there was one guide for just B and I, who described us as the most in-trim couple she’d ever seen 🙂 As we were only diving for one day we just brought our dive computers and masks and rented everything else. Max depth was 17m and I surfaced with ~120bar each time, so we could have gone for longer and perhaps would have done in our own kit but overall very happy with the experience.

Some images taken by the guide:

Touching two continents

Upcoming Running

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Gaius

To be updated as I add/complete more things:

Date	Event	Done
17^th April	Flitwick 10k	✓
15^th May	Paras’ 10 (run)	✓
30^th May	London 10k	✗
12^th June	St Albans ½ Marathon	✓
9^th July	Fan Dance with TTE. Basic kit only tho’!	✓
4^th September	Paras’ 10 (TAB)	✓
14^th Jan 2017	Hellrunner

First time at the Paras and the St Albans, but I have done Hellrunner 4× before, the last time was many years ago tho’, and Flitwick and London 10ks once before each. The Fan Dance will also be a new experience!

I have taken January and February to cross-train, have done quite a lot of swimming in the pool, working my way up to 1½ miles, but from March 1^st my focus is going to be back on running. Then another period of cross-training after the ½ Marathon, I think, before training to run in boots with a Bergen…

Fitness Goals

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Gaius

Well we are into 2016 now, I’d better write down my fitness goals for the year before we get too far in! I’ll post a followup near the end of the year. There are a couple of all-round fitness standards I have come across on the Internet, both from the American military, the first is the entry test for Ranger School:

49 pressups
59 sit-ups
6 chin ups† ✓
Run 2 miles in 15 minutes
Run 5 miles in 40 minutes

And the other is the Navy SEAL PST:

Swim 500 yards‡ in 12½ minutes
50 pressups
50 sit-ups
10 pull ups†
Run 1½ miles in 10½ minutes

Obviously I’m never going to attend either, but they’re not bad benchmarks for a 40-year-old geezer such as myself. I’ll do them individually too rather than as a single event, and those are the minimum scores, I gather that real candidates do far better, but if I reach all of them by the end of the year I’ll be happy. There are other standards of course, but these I can train for and measure myself against easily with what I have on hand, no special facilities required, just the local gym/pool and the park.

What’s this got to do with diving? Well I haul a lot of heavy gear around, and fitness improves SAC and tilts the odds of deco in your favour, so it’s all helpful. And I don’t want to start a third blog 🙂

† Underhand vs overhand grip in Rangers vs SEALs
‡ I’ll do metres, the local pool is 25m

Red Sea, 11-18 December 2015

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Gaius

This time B and I were able to join our ~~dive gang~~ fellow diving enthusiasts The Sons of Narky (Red Sea Original) on Blue O’Two‘s MV Blue Horizon for Northern Wrecks and Reefs. We hit a snag almost as soon as we arrived at Gatwick; our 2× additional baggage tickets just said “diving equipment” on them rather than “30Kg” that we had booked and paid for, so we had to argue at the check-in desk (and again at Hurghada on the way back). More about Hurghada airport later…

Of the 21 (I think) possible dives, we did 15:

Dive	Location	Description	Max/Avg depth (m)	Runtime (min)
1	Poseidon Reef	Check dive on air, then switched to Nitrox	14/11	51
2	Emperor Fraser	I know someone who was aboard at the time!	28/14	50
3	Shark & Yolanda	Current – did not make it round to toilets	22/14	55
4	Shark & Yolanda	Ditto	24/12	42
5	Alternatives / 7 Pinnacles	Night dive	12/8	37
6	Dunraven	Strong current	29/18	33
7	Thistlegorm	Outside	30/17	42
8	Thistlegorm	Inside	25/17	47
9	Carnatic		25/18	52
10	Giannis D		22/14	49
11	Rosalie Moller	Another leisurely lap around the upper deck – would love to come back with mix and spend a whole day on her. BO₂ wanted us back at the shotline with 3 mins no-deco remaining, but we have plenty of gas left in our twinsets.	34/22	34
12	Ulysses		27/18	39
13	Siyul Kebir	Dived Siyul Soraya last time	19/12	35
14	Shab El Erg	Dolphins!	12/8	50
15	Umm Gamar		19/11	52
	Total	runtime:		668

Perhaps we dived a bit less than last time such as only one night dive, but that was fine, with a large group of friends there was plenty of hanging out to be done and beer to be drunk 🙂 Kit-wise pretty much the same, Argonaut, manifolded twin AL-80’s, about 3.5Kg weight, with merino baselayer. There were 5 of us in drysuits and 6 in wetsuits (plus a dozen other guests on the boat, all of whom were in wetsuits). One thing that struck me is that there is plenty of great diving to be done in the ART/R3 range; I still intend to complete Normoxic or T1 but have no real urgency to do so.

On the way back, we were told to disconnect batteries from electrical devices, which is contrary to usual airport requirements at the moment that devices must be able to be switched on for inspection. Also it is usual that lithium ion batteries be carried in hand luggage not in the hold. But we did, only to discover at the airport that they were confiscating all batteries! A bit of fast talking meant we got to keep our Light Monkeys, but they made us check the heads into the hold (why?) and just take the batteries in hand luggage. We only lost the AAs from backup torches and the 18650s from the video lights so in total about £30 worth, plus all the stress. On the other side of security, we found a bunch of infuriated people it had happened to as well. Later discussion with local contacts indicated it was just to show the world that Egypt was finally taking security seriously after recent events. I am more than happy to comply with reasonable security measures, I just don’t see how this one helped…

Anyway, it was a great trip with great people on a great boat, would recommend to anyone.

Tekcamp, July 2015

Posted on July 19, 2015 by Gaius

We are just back from another amazing TEKCamp. I didn’t take as detailed notes as last time but had some great dives with Paul Toomer, Rich Walker, John Kendall, Mark Powell and Phil Short and attended some fascinating and inspiring talks. We also visited Fourth Element‘s underwater shop! Thanks to everyone involved and to the Vobster crew for organizing and hosting it!

One thing I will say tho’ – sure if a wreck is on the seabed, eventually it will be reclaimed by the sea and no-one will be able to see it, but that might take 50 or 100 years. If you nick the bell and the maker’s plate from the boiler and the portholes and stash them in your shed, then definitely no-one will see it and in 50 years your next-of-kin will probably sell them to a scrap merchant to be melted down. There was one speaker who bragged about his collection, then complained all the wrecks near the coast were “dived out”. The only negative thing about an otherwise brilliant event.

GUE Tech 1, Malta, March 2015

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Gaius

The first thing I should say before going any further is not to read too many blogs and writeups about T1. Going into the course with preconceptions, will only slow you down getting where you need to be. You should probably stop reading now.

The story begins in October last year when JK mentioned on his Facebook that he would be teaching at Techwise in Malta again the following March. Within hours a team had formed for Tech 1, GUE’s equivalent of Normoxic Trimix. I began preparing soon afterwards, taking advantage of my GUE membership to download the course materials, got my Fundies upgraded to Tech pass, did a dive trip to the Red Sea. Why T1 given that I already have ART which takes me to 48m and 15 mins deco? Isn’t this an expensive way to get another 3m? Not if you see your diving future as diving with GUE teams and participating in GUE projects. Then it makes perfect sense.

I am not going to write too much about the course; all 3 of us got Provisional ratings for reasons that JK explained in the debriefing that were entirely fair and accurate. A number of things conspired against us such as unseasonably bad weather in Malta that greatly restricted our choice of sites and blew us out altogether for 2 days; would that have made a difference to the end result? Well an extra 6 or 8 hours in the water couldn’t have hurt, but there is no point wondering what-if. We all have detailed plans going forwards to upgrade to full passes which I hope we will all manage in less than the 6 months allowed by GUE. We learnt all the skills, it will just take a little time to bed them in and get fluent in operating as a team. In the meantime we all have Rec3 cards (which allow 40m max depth, 21/35 backgas and a 32% stage for deco).

I will say tho’ that the gap between Fundies exit point and T1 entry point was much bigger than I expected; the 25 dives between courses that GUE requires, really do need to be in comparable conditions to the next course, and maybe should be 50 dives. Speaking for myself only, I did most of mine in the bright clear water of the Red Sea, where visual references for depth and natural navigation were plentiful, and I struggled with the task loading of executing the new skills “in the blue” with limited viz. It is actually surprisingly hard to use a teammate (+ gauge + compass) as visual reference, especially in a current, what tends to happen is vertical and directional oscillations ensue as each individual diver overcorrects. That too will come with time and a few more dives.

For future reference, the water was around 14℃, I wore merino baselayer and my Santi BZ200 undersuit, with 3Kg of v-weight. I started out with a lightweight hood and 1.5mm gloves but was glad I’d also brought a 5mm hood on the longer (2-3 hr) in-water times, near the end of which I was getting quite cold. Also very glad of my p-valve…

Drygloves

Posted on March 8, 2015 by Gaius

I have been trying a few configurations of my SiTech Antares system over the last few months, trying to find the right balance of warmth and dexterity. Of course it doesn’t matter how much dexterity a glove has on the surface, if your hands get too cold you lost it all anyway! These are the results of my experiments.

Option 1: Showa 660 size 9 with silk glove liners. I tried these on several dives in water between 7-9℃. This was a pretty good solution, the gloves are surprisingly warm considering how thin they are, with the size 9 gloves they fit my hands closely. The big disadvantage of this option is that the gloves are delicate, basically one touch of velcro will destroy them, so care must be taken in the order of kitting up and de-kitting. On longer dives in colder water tho’ I was starting to feel numb.
Option 2
Option 3
Option 4: Perhaps next winter I will try Santi heated gloves!

Another lesson is, the warmth of your hands makes a significant difference to your overall comfort. With option 3, I was far more comfortable for longer than with option 2, with all other kit being the same. I will need to swap out the rings to try to fix the slow leak before doing any more serious cold water diving tho’… I much prefer diving without gloves at all.