Category Archives: North Sea

2013 In Diving

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2013 has been a good year for diving. In January B and I went to Mexico for 2 weeks on a trip organized by LSD, we dived a few days in Cozumel, saw some bull sharks and lots of coral, one day locally in Playa Del Carmen, and the rest in the world famous cenotes with Aurelien Naudinat as guide and instructor for the PADI Cavern Diver cert.

On that trip I met a few more LSD people, including some instructors, and was inspired when I got back to sign up for Divemaster at LSD, starting in March and finishing in July, doing almost every weekend. My experiences of that are chronicled in this blog, but in summary I found it a very rewarding experience, and got to meet lots of interesting people, esp. my fellow DMTs. I did some work for LSD so am officially a professional diver. I added another pro qualification later in the year, EFR Instructor, in October.

August was a busy month, with a week’s holiday in the West Country with B, diving at Vobster in the mornings and visiting National Trust properties in the afternoons. While there we dipped a toe into the mysterious world of GUE taking the Primer course. Also in August, again with LSD we dived for a few days in the Farne Islands, with the seals. This was my first time in the North Sea, and B’s first in the UK, apart from inland. The following month in September, I added IANTD ART, the first step into technical diving. Unfortunately 2 dive weekends planned in October to exercise these new skills were both blown out, so I still have a twinset of 32/15 that I need to use! I have also located a local source for fills.

Now for the bad news, I had planned to continue diving all throughout the winter, but in November at Wraysbury I slipped on the ramp and ended up breaking my leg in two places. At first I thought it was just a sprain and tried to “walk it off”, then went to the pub, but it wasn’t getting any better and so B drove me to A&E where an x-ray showed what had happened. Weirdly, I couldn’t even feel one of the breaks. Next month hopefully I will be getting the screws out then can properly heal, and insh’Allah will have enough strength and mobility in my ankle to manhandle a twinset on land and on deck, and do a back kick! Otherwise it might need to be sidemounts.

This has been quite a training-heavy year, but I feel that my diving has come on leaps and bounds, next year we have GUE Fundamentals in April in Malta and Tekcamp but I want to get a lot more “just diving” in, and perhaps a nice easy Red Sea trip with my regular dive gang the Sons of Narky (Red Sea Original), which I missed this year due to a scheduling clash.

Farne Islands, 24-26 August 2013

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For the bank holiday weekend, a group of 7 of us from Club LSD went up to the Farne Islands to dive with the friendly seals, with skipper Paul Walker, as salty a sea-dog as I’ve ever sailed with, on the Farne Discovery. This was my first time diving in the North Sea (and B’s first sea diving in the UK), and we were keen to put into practice some of the GUE style of diving we have been learning for real dives. The first thing I discovered is that it’s a lot colder than the PADI style, in water of 13-15℃ I was cold in the same kit I would be comfortable in in water 5℃ colder! In the end I wore the PBB+ under my 5mm neoprene drysuit that I wore in water fully 10℃ colder in March, and was comfortable. This, plus saltwater, meant 5Kg in my weight belt, over and above my 6mm backplate and weighted STA (7.5Kg). I found getting out of my harness to pass it up onto the RIB straightforward, but it was a struggle to operate boltsnaps in 5mm gloves. Here I must confess that I actually attached my SPG to my LPI hose so it wouldn’t dangle but I could still check it without clipping on and off 😦 I am sure it will come with practice, or bigger boltsnaps, or both. I could do my primary hose, but only if I didn’t think about it and used pure muscle memory, once I did it became impossible.

We did 6 dives over 3 days, at a variety of locations chosen by Paul based on his local knowledge and consultations with other skippers. Seal sighting varied from “1 in the distance” to more seals than you could count (B referred to this as being sealbombed :-)), with plenty of crabs and lobsters too. For the final dive we considered doing the Coryton but the sea conditions weren’t right for it, so we did a repeat of the first dive, along a wall with lots of soft corals. The seals aren’t very deep (they can obviously, but not just to play), we averaged <10m depth for all but one of the dives, so one cylinder was sufficient for both dives, tho’ we brought two each. On days 2 and 3, early fog meant that we didn’t set off ’til 10am, which made a nice change from the “crack of dawn” which is most UK diving. At the end of each dive I deployed my DSMB on a spool, which went mostly well, apart from one time it just – inexplicably – got completely stuck in its pouch on my left leg. I struggled with it for several minutes committing multiple Rule 6 violations when in retrospect I should obviously just have left it and either got B to do it, or lend me hers. By sheer coincidence there is a good article on DSMB deployment in the current issue of Quest which popped through my letterbox this morning!

All in all I would definitely recommend a trip up there. It was about a 7 hour drive from London → Seahouses, with the boat setting out from Beadnell Bay which was about a 5 minute drive from there. We took everything with us including cylinders and weights and got fills at Sovereign Diving, from their dive centre, it didn’t look like there was much rental of kit. I will possibly organize a trip like this myself with some friends, now that we have scouted it out.