A Tour Around the Hat

So, the decompression dive! A fun day out, which began by trying on the Siebe-Gorman deep-sea commercial diving gear. This is the big brass helmet that everyone pictures when you say "deep sea diving", and was used by the Royal Navy until around 1980. There is a excellent reason they don't use it any more; it's incredibly heavy. The whole deep-sea rig, including weighed boots and ballast, weighs around two and a half stone more than I do. (For comparison, my usual scuba gear weighs about a third what I do.)

Commercial diving helmets are known as "hats", and it was quite fascinating being given a tour around the equipment, until the time came to get into it. I'm sure regular commercial gear is also pretty heavy, but with this you basically put it on and go in the water, just to get the weight off your shoulders. It was fun, and I'm glad I did it, but my dive log entry reads "Give me scuba any day!" At the end of the dive, the instructors gave us instructions for the decompression "dive"; interrupt the instructor a lot, and take a balloon in. (A balloon blown up at the "deepest" point of a chamber dive will explode as the pressure decreases on the way back up again, making a bang and getting bits of rubber all over the inside of the camber.)

Onwards to the decompression chamber. I don't know what you may be picturing, but try picturing a big metal cyclinder on legs in someone's basement, and you've pretty much got it. (Surrounded, for some reasons, by pictures of pin-up girls. Apparently Scubapro used to think "naked tits" were what they needed to use to sell dive gear back in the day; thank God we've moved on - a bit.) The chamber looks so small, you cannot imagine one person fitting in, but five of us managed to sit next to each other.

A "chamber dive" involves sitting in a decompression chamber whilst the air pressure inside is increased to the equivalent of a 50m deep dive in water (beyond the recreational limit). This allows you to experience the narcosis you get at this level; nitrogen breathed under increased pressure makes you feel drunk. The chamber attendent then decreases the air pressure, including two decompression "stops" on the way "up", and at some point, the balloon goes bang. This is a useful experience to have for two reasons; 1) it gives you the experience of the narcosis you get when diving to 50m, and the sensation of being unable to "surface" (or leave the chamber) until the dive concludes, and 2) you get to experience what chamber treatment is like, which is good since it's the standard treatment for decompression injuries sustained when diving.

I was expecting to be nervous, but the dive was, actually, very good fun. Probably it's the narcosis, but we had a whale of a time. Except for the attendent, who spoke through the chamber's radio in tones of deep resignation "Can you pick up all the pieces of the balloon on the way out, please."

"I've Done This For Real..."

I've been busying myself arranging some dive training. I shall be spending tomorrow at the Diving College near York, playing around with old-fashioned dive gear, and doing a "pot dive", where they put you in a hyperbaric chamber and drop the pressure to the equivalent of a 50m dive, which is beyond my current range. I'm a bit nervous about this last one, but it will be good to find out what a "pot" is like on the inside, since if I ever have an accident whilst diving, that's where I'll end up.

Hyperbaric chambers are known as "pots" by divers, after one of the most famous; the chamber designed by Jack Haldane, son of JS Haldane who, among his many other accomplishments, pretty much single-handedly created dive tables and made it possible to dive without giving yourself the bends. More about the amazing Haldanes here: Grace under pressure.

The next  training course will be in two week's time, and will involve no diving at all; I'm renewing my Emergency First Responder certification. Basically a First Aid course angled at divers. I last did this two years ago, and I'm overdue a refresher. My memories of the last time I did this mostly go as follows:

• One of the senior divers there had a small white Scottie dog that used to live in the shop. One look at all of us crowding in to do our training, and it ran and hid under the wetsuit rack, and wouldn't come out. 
• Most First Aid training is less about splinting broken bones and more about "here's how to keep them alive until the ambulance gets here".
• The instructor [who works as a nurse] started the CPR training by remarking "I've done this for real three times; they all died". (Statistically, that's pretty much how it goes. the odds are one in ten, but you do it in the hope that the person you're currently rescue-snogging will be the one in ten.)

The next stop is to refresh my Rescue Diver training. It is one of my weirder accomplishments that I can give people mouth-to-mouth in the sea.  Here's hoping I never have to.

Possibly the creepiest photo I've ever taken (Jersey)

This is a baby (doll, thank God) in a gas crib (the infant equivalent of a gas mask) in the Jersey war tunnels, where I spent some time a few weeks ago. I was there for a happy occasion - a cousin's christening - but the day after the christening was an odd day. I was meant to dive but couldn't, due to the weather.

Instead, I went to the Jersey War Tunnels. Jersey was the only part of the British Isles to have been occupied by the Nazis during World War Two. The tunnels were built by the Nazis as an underground hospital, and the site is now a museum dedicated to the occupation.

This was the same day that I knew all of my friends at work were getting their results from the redundancy process at work. I knew mine, as my boss had let me know just before I headed off to Jersey, which was nice of him. (Well, it was nice, since I'd kept my job. Had it been bad news, I might have taken a different view.)

I wandered round the memorial garden, trying not to think about what was going on on in my office, at that moment, and feeling vaguely guilty that my sense of perspective was off.

Spent the rest of the afternoon watching "Gone Girl", as the news slowly trickled in by text about who was in, and who was out. As movie choices go, it seemed appropriate.

Return From Malta

I'm now back from Malta, and, after a week back in the UK, I've finally washed and put away all my diving gear. I'm a firm believer that my wetsuit should become acquainted with disinfectant on a regular basis, although this is not necessarily much fun when it gets dark at 4.30pm. I'm probably getting a reputation in the neighbourhood as Crazy Wetsuit in Bucket Lady.

Anyway. More tales of drunkenness and octopodes* in due courses.


* Believe it or not, this is the correct plural for octopus.