Boat of Puking Divers, Part the Third

B sat with his arms folded.

“Why aren’t you going back in?” I asked, as I attempted to make myself a coffee whilst not acquiring a burn on my left arm to match the one on my right (the result of an accident with a kettle earlier this year); no easy feat when the boat is pitching around.

“It’s cold.”

This surprised me, as B is by no means a fair-weather diver. Then it occurred to me. “Didn’t you just get back from the Phillipines?”

He gave me a look of deepest gloom. If you imagine the expression of people who have just arrived back on the plane from Florida in August wearing t-shirts, shorts and sandals only to look out of the plane window and see black skies and hurling rain, multiplied by a factor of ten, you’ve more or less got it. “Yup.”

“’Scuse me.”

This was not B, but A, another regular dive buddy of mine. A suddenly stood up and dashed past me to join the other divers on the puking side of the boat*. This also surprised me, since I’ve never seen A throwing up on the boat.

“What’s up with him?”

“Two bottles of wine and a brandy last night.”

“No sympathy then.”

“’Scuse me.”

B pushed past me to join A. This was becoming a pattern. I looked through the wildly-lurching porthole, and counted five people throwing up over the side. This was something of a record, which J, the senior divemaster pointed out with slightly more relish than was necessary. I decided to go outside myself; I’m not usually cursed with seasickness (thank you, God), but even I was feeling slightly “off”. The best way to cure this is to sit in the fresh air and look at the horizon, which I did for all of five minutes, before I got fed up with being rained on and decided I could look at the horizon through the entrance to the cabin.

As I wandered in vaguely thinking about a Mini Roll, J was asking “Does this banana belong to anyone?”

I looked across. “Yes, it’s L’s,” I replied, somewhat pointlessly since half the banana was well on its way to become part of J. I sincerely hoped this meant L wasn’t going to be suffering on our next dive. I can’t say that I was exactly looking forward to the dive – I was having visions of the warm seas, clear water, and sunshine I hoped to encounter on my upcoming summer holiday in Crete** – but it did have the great advantage that it would take us away from the boat of puking divers.



* There is a system for this, and it’s mentioned in the PADI Manual, believe it or not. You go to the leeward side of the boat (leeward = if you stand on that side facing towards the sea, the wind is blowing on the back of your head, not the front – windward is the other way around), and throw up over the side, the theory being that the wind will blow it away from both you and the boat. Which makes sense, since if there’s one thing guaranteed to add insult to injury when you’ve just thrown up, it’s getting it all blown back in your face. (The PADI Manual also helpfully adds: “Stay out of the head [toilet] – that’s about the worst place to go”).

** Correctly, as it turned out. Watch this space.

Boat of Puking Divers, Part the Second

I cannot say that the first dive out of Eyemouth was the most visually interesting dive I’ve ever done, but in its own way, it had a certain hypnotic calm. Vis was not too bad, and we were at 12-15m. The only real sights were the pale grey rippled sand beneath us, the green water around us, an occasional rock or crab on the bottom, and thousands of small hydroids in the water around us. Hydroids are the free-floating larvae of sea anemones before they attach themselves to rocks, and look like very small jellyfish. It was a surreal experience, but in some ways almost meditative, drifting steadily along with the current and following the divers ahead.

After half an hour, I was mentally taking bets with myself as to how soon it would be before the large male novice diver (LMND) in front of me got towards the reserve on his air tank and we went up*. I interspersed this with the occasional barrel roll to see if my buddy was there, as he had a fondness for swimming about two metres above me. Technically I should have been swimming at the same level he was, but I like to see what’s on the bottom… he told me afterwards that drifting along with the current with only the bottom for reference was giving him nausea and vertigo, and he was happier swimming a bit higher up.

The answer proved to be “not that much longer”. LMND and his buddy started to head upwards, accompanied by a flurry of hand signals from the instructor in charge of the dive. My buddy produced his SMB and deployed it at about 6m whilst we were making a safety stop: it was as well he did it at this depth, as the line attached to the damn thing got tangled around his tank valve, and we did the underwater Untangling Waltz. Buddy and I surfaced with no mishaps and yoicked ourselves back onto the boat (thank god for boats with lifts).

The instructor informed us that his hand signals had been intended to mean “you two can carry on if you want to”. We replied that our actions had been intended to mean “we know, but we don’t want to ‘cause it’s a bit cold and boring, and we fancy a cup of tea and a Mini Roll”.

In search of the aforementioned Mini Roll, I lurched into the cabin – the sea was getting quite choppy – and encountered a shivering, coat-wrapped and be-hatted mass in the form of one of my regular dive buddies, B. B looked up at me and ground out “I’m not going back in there”.

It was going to be one of those mornings.


* Risk factors for going through your air quickly: being a physically large person, being male, and being new (new divers tend to move through the water less efficiently, and waste more air through inflating and deflating their buoyancy jackets). The reserve air is the amount of air everyone on the dive agrees to have left at the end of the dive, usually around 50 bag. You never plan to dive until the tank is empty, for safety reasons – you need the reserve in case something delays you on the way to the surface or one of your buddies runs low on air.

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I've been writing stuff, believe me, and it will be posted here at the weekend. Until then, in the words of someone much wiser than me...