Stoney Cove, Part the Second

We hung around passing our surface interval* time by discussing the previous dive, sheltering from the rain beneath the car boot lid, and consuming hot chocolate and ham and spready cheese sarnies. After two hours had passed, we strapped ourselves back into our gear, ready to tackle our next dive.

We'd decided to do a shorter dive to take in the Stanegarth, then practise our navigation skills by trying to find the new attraction, the Belinda (another sunken ship). We finned out to the buoy marking the Stanegarth, then descended the line from the buoy to the wreck.

Or, in my case, tried to. I remember thinking "This descent is taking a while", then looked at my computer and realised I was actually shallower than I had been one minute previously. I'd got disorientated as there were no visual references to help me judge whether I was going up or down, just the surrounding green murky water and the white shotline. Fortunately S was in attendance to help guide me down to the wreck, where I would like to say I landed elegantly on the deck, but in fact the phrase "crashed into it and then floundered about inelegantly getting pulled off-balance by the 15L tank I wasn't quite used to yet" would be more accurately. I was really annoyed with myself for buggering up whilst diving with two more experienced divers, but you can't let these things bother you under the water, it spoils your concentration and the dive. It's all a learning experience anyway.

We descended into the interior of the Stanegarth, which, technically, was breaking the rule against not going into overhead environments without equipment and training. On the other hand, the wreck itself is so small you can't get lost, but not so small you are going to get stuck, and has multiple easy exits including a large overhead hatches, so we went in. It was the first time I'd been inside a sunken ship, and it was rather cool, spoiled only by the realisation that my new underwater torch was (hopefully) still sitting on the side of the dock. Bugger! (The photo on the left, which I didn't take, shows the Stanegarth.)

We swam around the Stanegarth, then took a compass reading of 140 degrees and headed off to find the Belinda. After three minutes, a ship loomed up before us, and I remember thinking "Hey, we're getting good at this navigation lark!"

Then I read the name on the front of the ship - Defiant - and thought "Hmm, maybe we're not". On the other hand, we got to see the Defiant, then S made a hand signal I hadn't seen before, of crossing her hands in front of her chest to form a large 'X'. I interpreted it (correctly, as it turned out) as meaning "Time to end this dive".

M sent up a surface marker buoy to give us a line to help with our ascent from 22M - or tried to. I am not an expert on their use, but it was pretty obvious from the fussing of M and S that it was not working the way it was supposed to. Instead, we made a free ascent (an ascent with no visual reference except your computer or depth gauge), finning carefully to maintain our position at 5m deep for a 3 minute safety stop**. We broke the surface and S gave her opinion on the SMB, which I shall reproduce here as "it's not working very well".

We decided to use up our air by finning over to the 7m shelf near the dock, descending to the Nautilus (a model of Captain Nemo's submarine, shown in the photo I didn't take on the left) and feeding the fish with a plastic bag of sweetcorn which M had in her buoyancy jacket for this particular purpose. We descended, looked at the sub, fed the fish, and submerged to find my torch sitting where I'd left it. S advised me to get a clip for it to secure it to my jacket, which I have since done.

We wandered over to the shop, where I realised that I must be a diver. Some women impulse-buy shoes. I impulse-buy big steel bottles full of air. Stoney Cove had some 12L tanks for sale at a very reasonable price, and I decided that hmm, yes, I did want to stop paying £10 to hire a tank every time I want to dive. I purchased the tank, the mesh to protect the paintwork, and the magnetic "compressed air" sign to go on the back of the car. We said our fond farewells, promised to dive together again soon, and I loaded tank, self and dive gear into the car, and headed North and home.

* time on the surface inbetween dives. Necessary to allow your body to "off-gas" i.e. eliminate the nitrogen dissolved in your tissues following the dive. This happens through respiration. The ambient pressure at the surface is lower than when submerged, and whilst you're at the surface, the nitrogen slowly moves out of your tissues, goes into the bloodstream, and is expelled through the lungs. "The bends" happen when you have nitrogen dissolved in your body tissues and move too quickly from being at greater pressure (which keeps it dissolved in your tissues), to being at lower pressure, when it begins to move out of your tissues in bubbles which are too large to safely pass into the bloodstream and do damage to the body on their way out.

Surface intervals allow you to eliminate dissolved nitrogen in between your dives, allowing the second dive to take place safely and giving you more time under the water. If you still have nitrogen dissolved in your tissues from a previous dive, future dives have to be shorter, so that you don't absorb so much nitrogen you can't safely eliminate it without doing decompression stops - which, as a recreational diver, I'm not trained to do (technical divers do decompression diving, recreational divers are not trained for it and don't have the gear to do it safely).

** safety stop. A 3 minute pause at 5 metres deep at the end of a dive to allow dissolved nitrogen to move slowly out of your tissues at a safe rate - the 5m depth maintains sufficient ambient pressure than the nitrogen does not move as quickly out of your tissues as it would at the surface. Differs from a decompression stop because it is not mandatory. Theoretically, you could skip the safety stop and, provided you kept your dive within the no-decompression depth and time limits, you should be safe from the bends. ("Should be" because all divers differ in their physical size, fitness and breathing rates, hence the theoretical models used to calculate no decompression times do not necessarily fit all divers exactly the same.) A decompression stop is required, in the sense of "if you don't do this you'll get the bends".

Deep Dive at Stoney Cove

Last week I fufilled a long-standing ambition to dive with my aunt M, the only diver in the family until I took it up, and her buddy S. S is a technical diver, extremely knowledgeable - the sort of person who services her own regulators*.

We dove at Stoney Cove, one of the two major inland quarry diving sites in the UK (Capernwray is the other one). It was my first freshwater dive, all my dives to date having been in the sea, meaning that on the first day there we did a short "check dive" so I could get my weights right. You are less buoyant in freshwater than in salt water, so you need less weight to offset the exposure suit's buoyancy. I normally dive with 9kg in salt water, and dove with 5kg in fresh, using the same exposure suit but a slightly larger tank: 15L compared to my usual 12L for floating around Beadnell.

Stoney Cove was fun. There were a lot of fish - roach and perch - down there, and quite a few crayfish. I recorded my deepest ever dive, 32 metres. We followed the old quarry road down to the deepest part of the pit. Didn't quite get down to the bottom, as M signalled that she was getting a little cold. I wasn't too bad so long as we kept moving, but it was cold down there; about 7 degrees C. I remember thinking "Hey, look at all those big numbers on my dive computer!" followed shortly by "Hmm, 6 minutes of no-decompression time left... that's not so good, time to turn this around". That was about when M signalled she was cold, so we didn't make it as deep as the Deep Hydrobox, which lies at 36m in the quarry. Next time!

Perhaps I should have been more scared than I was, diving that deep, but I don't remember being scared. Once you get past about 15m, you can't rely on CESA-ing your way out of trouble, and I've dived deeper than that before. At that depth, you rely on your training, your dive plan (and gas planning), and close communication with your buddies. I didn't feel narc'ed, though we didn't do any tests for it - perhaps my slower reaction to seeing the 6 minutes on my computer was a sign? I felt in control, though, so it's difficult to tell.

More tales coming soon.

* The things you breathe through.

A Ride in the Rain

The "Cycling" part of my blogging name is still active, which is just as well, as an ear infection has temporarily stopped me diving (though I expect to be back in the water a week today). I cycle to and from work, and last Tuesday I went for a ride from work in Newcastle out to Derwenthaugh in Gateshead, shown on the left.

Boy, was it a mistake to decide I didn't need my waterproof trousers and overshoes! The top half of me was dry, but the heavens opened both on the way there and back, and my legs were drenched. Not as drenched as our group leader, who is famous for cycling in her ordinary clothes including, on this occasion, white trousers and red high heels. In a funny sort of way, I really respect that, although on this occasion it did mean that we were pedalling like maniacs to keep up with an angry Frenchwoman who wanted to get home to a towel and a shower.

It was actually quite a good ride, in a strange way. There's something in the British psyche that derives a certain pleasure in being out of doors when it's tipping it down. The world was being washed clean, and only those few of us out of doors could truly appreciate it. It wasn't that cold, and as the sun came out, we had some glorious views of the Tyne and its bridges. Even so, it was a very welcome hot chocolate that I consumed when I got in!

CyclingDiver's Rules For Cycling Whilst Wearing A Hat

1. Don't.

2. If you do, tie the hat on firmly first.

3. If you ignore rules 1 & 2, avoid cycling down hills.

4. If you ignore rules 1, 2 & 3, and you go down a hill fast, and the hat starts coming off, ignore it. Under no circumstances give in to either of the contradictory urges to a) grab the hat, b) hit the brakes.

5. Otherwise you will plough the bike and yourself smack into the tarmac, knees first, knock the wind out of yourself, and knock your front wheel out of alignment, such that you have to pay the bike shop a tenner to realign it. And end up with bruises like these:

Yep, that was the famous "Fell off my bike whilst on a cycling holiday incident". That it was my own fault, and that I fell off because I'd gone to view a church, just added insult to injury.

Cakepalooza

Yesterday turned out to be a cakepalooza. A friend at work had a birthday and brought in two giant cakes:

Then the charity cake trolley came round to raise money for a local hospice:

I suppose I should feel guilty about eating that much cake. I just don't. Went to the pub in the evening for a friend's birthday as well, so overall it was a great day. Here's a photo of the sunset from the beer garden:

Sunny, With A Chance of Panic Attacks - Glastonbury Festival Day 1

Warning: This is a long post. You might want to go and get yourself a cup of tea first.

June 23rd

It was 10am as I arrived at Newcastle Central Station on the No. 1 bus on a warm sunny Wednesday morning in Newcastle (itself a rarity). Deep breath. Calm.

In the interests of this blogpost making sense, I should maybe mention at this point that I’m prone to anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, for which I’m on the magic happy pills [Citalopram – an SSRI for those with an interest in such things] that make it largely go away. I’m not particularly embarrassed about this, nor is it – any more – a serious handicap for me, since a combination of pills and therapy mean that these days I can usually leave the house without having to check three times that the oven is turned off. (It usually is.)

Unfortunately for me, anything involved large amounts of organising and going away from home tends to trigger the OCD. This is a perfect description of my role organising volunteers for the bars at the Glastonbury Festival, so it took me a few minutes of sternly talking-to myself before I peeled myself away from checking for the fifth time that the front door was locked (it was), took some deep breaths, and marched off to get the bus. Funnily enough, once I’m actually on the bus / train / plane / whatever, the anxiety goes away, in a sort of “The die is cast” kind of a way, so I was fine once I got the bus. I checked again that I had all the necessities (phonepursekeysdebitcardmoneytrainticketsdetailsofpeopleI’mmeetingupwithatLeedsyesit’sall
there), took a deep breath, admired the lovely sunny day, and applied myself to reading the Metro.

10am, beseated myself beneath the big clock at Central Station, and waited for my fellow volunteer, N, from Newcastle to arrive. I wasn’t too worried. I was calm. He’d be here soon. We were due to get the train at 10.44am.

10.15am. This was the time we’d agreed to meet.

10.20am. He’d be here soon, right?

10.25am: Began minor panic attack in which I began to seriously worry that something had happened to him or I’d given him the wrong date – but we’d exchanged emails for the past week or so in which we’d discussed our arrangements for meeting up and he’d replied to all of them. What could have happened? Started making phone calls to his office / my office to see if there were any messages for me – there weren’t. Called his phone – no reply.

10.30am: Still no news and no reply to my calls. Started having visions of going to the Glastonbury Festival on my own, or at least turning up to meet the volunteers from the union’s Young Members group at Leeds station (whom we’d agreed to meet at Leeds station, since we were all travelling down from the North together) on my own with no explanation for why my fellow volunteer wasn’t with me.

10.35am: To get the train or not to get the train? I decided not to. There was another train after it which still allowed us to get to Leeds in time, and I’d factored this in to us getting the 10.44am train. I texted my contact from the volunteers we were meeting at Leeds to let them know the score.

10.40am: I reflected gloomily on every single thing that had gone wrong in organising volunteers for the Glastonbury Festival this year, such as the form that went missing (meaning that we got two places, not four) to the difficulty I’d had filling the volunteer places with only two people going, and thought that having me alone go to Glastonbury would be the perfect cap on the crappiest year of organising festival volunteers I’d ever had.

10.44am: Train left.

10:46am: Birdsong could not compare to the sweetest sound in the world, nor could choirs of angels; my mobile phone rang with a number I didn’t recognise, but which I knew had to be N’s. It was. (It turned out I had the wrong number for him stored in my phone for some reason.) N had had car trouble on the way here, but was now at Central Station.

I took a deep breath, calmed down, told N that the contingency plan was to get the next train, and we met at the clock. He was fine, albeit flustered. A large cup of tea (for N) and coffee (for me), a phone call to N’s brother to arrange for him to collect and fix the broken-down car, and at 11.10am we were brandishing our open-return tickets at the conductor on the train to Leeds. The journey passed pleasantly, since it turned out we had a similar interest in care for older and vulnerable people (N is a social worker and I do research on this topic). By the time the train arrived at Leeds it was obvious we would get on just fine for the next seven days which we’d be spending in each other’s company.

The next step was to meet the volunteers from the union’s Regional Young Members team, who had caught the 10.44am train from Durham and agreed to meet us in the pub at Leeds station. C, my contact for them, had informed me that they’d be in the White Rose pub at Leeds station, and that he looked like Shrek. I was on the lookout for someone with green skin and funny ears, but N and I decided that it was more probably the young man and woman in the corner who were surrounded by mounds of camping equipment.

They turned out to be C and T from the Young Members group, who were happily ensconced in the corner of the pub eating a burger and sipping a pint whilst they waited for the third member of their team, L, to arrive. L apparently had had difficulty with her manager, despite having booked her leave for the festival, and it had taken until this morning for her to have it confirmed that she was going to be able to go, so she was on the later train. We all agreed this was deeply unfair, and had a drink. N and I ate sandwiches, and we swapped tales of ourselves and our day jobs: Me = researcher, N = social worker, T = works with children in Durham, C = works for Npower, as does L. C warned us: “The thing about L – she’s absolutely lovely – but she can be a bit bonkers. You’ll see when you meet her.”

As it approached 2pm with L not having arrived, I tried to suppress my “Mexican jumping bean” impression which I get when I think I’m going to miss a coach or a train or something. The WBC coach from Leeds to Glastonbury left at 3pm from Leeds Bus Station, and missing it meant missing the festival. Everyone else was more laid back. I went out to research where taxis left from.

At 2.11pm, a young woman with shorts, glasses, a t-shirt, a huge backpack, giant black Goth boots and a large cowboy hat with a cowhide pattern hurried up yelling “Hellllooooo!” This was L, and the gang was complete. We deliberated over whether to walk or get a taxi. I said “Taxi”, and taxi it was. It’s a funny thing about life that often all that matters is whether someone makes the decision, not how it was made nor even whether it was a particularly good decision. We got a taxi, ignored the slightly disgusted look of the taxi driver that we were only going as far as Leeds Bus Station (never mind the fact that we all had huge backpacks) and were sitting in the sunshine on the grass outside Mecca Bingo with our fellow volunteers by half two.

As we awaited the arrival of the coach, the team bonded some more. We learned that L and C were the best of friends, despite the fact that they argue nineteen to the dozen. Also that L was absolutely adorable, had a passion for cows (not like that!), and talked nineteen to the dozen with a huge grin on her face about everything from cows, the Download festival she’d been to recently, the managers who had led to her having to get the late train and nearly missing the festival, and her new boyfriend, who she was clearly head-over-heels for.

At 2.40pm, the coach rolled up. Unlike last year, there actually was a member of the WBC management staff with a register of people who were meant to be on the coach. We got ourselves ticked off, got our gear loaded up, got on the coach and basked in the air-conditioning. I reflected on the fact that this might be the first Glastonbury festival I’d been to where I actually didn’t need wellies. The coach rolled forward at 3.05pm. and we were off! Finally, we were on our way, and I could relax. From here, we were definitely going to the festival and whilst I wasn’t officially responsible for the Young Members team, I was the only one of the five of us who’d ever been to Glastonbury before, let alone worked behind a bar there. I allowed a grin to spread over my face. Despite everything, we were on our way to Glastonbury, and it looked like the five of us would get on like a house on fire, which was great. You really need a group of at least four of you to go to Glastonbury, it’s more fun that way, and it looked like this was gonna be a good ‘un.

As coach journeys go, it was an interesting one. Mainly because the WBC guy who’d had the register sat at the front and talked non-stop at a loud volume about everything from motorbikes at the Redbeck Motel - interesting to me, since it’s near my home town and I’ve eaten there a few times - to chicken husbandry, which he clearly had a deep interest in. He also swore so much whilst doing so that C commented to me as we munched on burgers at the service station “You know, I swear a fair bit myself, but that guy…” The stop at the service station was also enlivened by a suicidal caravan-owner who pulled out right in front of our coach, despite the GIVE WAY markings in front of him. Catastrophe, and having to pick bits of caravan out of the front of the coach, was only just averted.

The coach set off again, with me mentally crossing my fingers that this was not going to be a repeat of the god-awful journey we’d had last time, when the coach sat in traffic for six hours waiting to get in the Festival and we arrived there at half two in the morning to be told that the WBC canteen had just closed, and no, we couldn’t get our passes until the morning, so going out into the festival site to buy food wasn’t going to happen either. About the only good thing about that year’s journey had been the hero coach driver, who kept up a cheerful and encouraging commentary, despite the fact he must have been knackered, and brought along his entire Coen brothers DVD collection to play on the coach. We all tipped him at least £3 each – he’d earned it.

Happily, this year was infinitely better. The coach pulled up in the festival car park at 8.30pm, as the sun was dropping low on the horizon. As we stood around looking at our luggage and waiting for someone to tell us where to go next, I took the chance to try explain the concept of “festival time” to everyone.

“Festival time” essentially means “Stuff will happen when it is ready to happen”, or manana. At the festival, there is no point rushing about or getting impatient because things aren’t happening right now, or on schedule. Stuff will happen when it is ready to happen. Sit down in the shade. Stand in the queue. Chill out, have a drink and a chat.

It also means that the normal rules of life and time don’t apply. Why work to a 9-5 timetable when there is no 9-5? If you don’t have to get enough sleep and be up to work at 9am, it’s perfectly sensible to stay up until four in the morning, then kip until 8am - kipping in the tents for later than this was well-nigh impossible, for reasons that will shortly be described - stagger up, shower, dress, eat, then find a convenient shady spot and kip in it for a few hours, or go watch a band, have an afternoon nap under a tree, then stay up all night. Medieval peasants used to do this sort of thing, and I’m told it’s found elsewhere in the world; instead of one long period of sleep, two short ones over 24 hours.

This all, alas, had one very important exception for us: WBC volunteers do not get the luxury of applying this philosophy to our shifts, for which we must always be ten minutes early else risk getting our organisations in trouble (i.e. fewer or no places for the following year).

At that particular moment, however, everyone was really more interested in getting onsite and getting their tents up before the sunset. This wasn’t going to happen too fast, since the coach had dropped us in the wrong place. It was supposed to take us inside the festival site and drop us off outside our campsite. Instead, either the stewards had misunderstood or the driver had misunderstood the stewards (or he hadn’t been provided with the correct pass to enter the site, which would cause us some major problems in five days’ time), and dropped us at the coach park, outside the fence. If you’ve ever been to Glastonbury, you’ll know that getting inside the security fence is no easy matter, so we were somewhat stuck.

We hung about on the grass outside the fence waiting for a steward to show up and let us in, and had a natter. I took some photos of the sunset. Finally, the stewards arrived with our wristbands, we were let in, and we walked, or in some cases staggered, down to the WBC village, our home for the next five days. The sun was setting, but we had enough light to pick a nice camping spot, near but not too near to the toilets and marquee. I had my trusty £15 tent from the Famous Army Stores, first bought for a People and Planet festival I attended as a student way back in 2003. It and I have survived the 2005 and 2007 Glastonbury festivals. It may not be the fanciest tent in the world, but by golly it’s good for festivals.

Tents were pitched, airbeds were blown up, L’s giant Goth boots were pressed into service as an improvised tent peg mallet, and we descended upon the bar in the marquee. After a long day, no-one really wanted to stay up too late, and we had a briefing at an unfeasibly early hour the following morning. We drank, we chilled, we crawled into our tents, did a round of “Night Johnboy”s, and kipped. I fell asleep with a smile on my face. The omens were good.