Back in the Sea

I managed my first sea dive of the year yesterday. I say "dive"; we managed about 3.5m of depth, and the viz was as shown in the photo!

Still, 'tis good to have some saltwater on my gear. Also, we were at St Mary's Island, and whilst the seals didn't get too close, they did pop their heads up to see who the strangers were. All in all, it was way more fun than being at work.

The Terror of Space

I was reading this article on people signing up for the Mars One expedition; a one-way trip to Mars. I cannot imagine anything much more terrifying.

The article describes the selection process for people wanting to take part. I do wonder if any part of it (yeah, you know this is coming) involved asking "Have you done any scuba diving?"

I don't often talk about the scary aspect of diving. Most other divers don't. We know it is there, and if it bothered us, we wouldn't do it. Talking about to non-divers gives the wrong impression, and can put people off. And by "wrong impression", I don't mean I'm pretending something dangerous is safe. Scuba diving is in a similar risk category to jumping into half a ton of metal and barrelling down a narrow asphalt strip at 70mph. Actually, if you check out this infographic (worth it just for the hilarious illustrations), it may well be safer than being in a car. 

The scary aspect of diving is one that it took me a while to grasp. Possibly all those people who reacted to my tales of diving with "Ohmigod, I could NEVER do that" grasped it faster than I did. From my point of view, I know where I'm going, I assess if it's safe and if my buddy and I can get to where we want to go and back with the air supply we've got. And if we can do all those things, then off we swim, breathing happily through our regulators with 12m of water over our heads.

And all that is fine, up until the proverbial hits the fan, and you suddenly realise with absolute clarity that you are in an alien environment where, to quote one of my favourite blogs on diving, "A single breath of the ambient atmosphere can, kind reader, fucking kill you".

I have never had a catastrophic experience when diving, but I had one very nasty experience when I over-breathed my regulator about 25m down in the Farne Islands (meaning I was breathing very heavily and too fast, and the regulator was struggling to deliver gas at the rate I was demanding it - gas thickens slightly at depth, which is why all divers are advised to breathe deep and slow). I felt like I was suffocating. More scary than that, I could feel myself starting to panic. Panic is the number one killer of divers. There are few more potentially panic-inducing situations than being surrounded by water, with 25m of it above your head, and not being able to breathe the air that is the only thing keeping you alive.

Fortunately for me, my dive training took over. I realised what was happening, and took the appropriate action; ascending slowly until the pressure lowered slightly, my breathing rate dropped as the surface got slightly nearer, the regulator began delivering the gas more easily, and I calmed down and carried on with the dive. But for a few seconds, I suddenly understood why panicking divers rocket up to the surface and rip all their dive gear off their faces. If willpower alone could cause humans to teleport, I would have been out of the water and on the boat in two seconds.

The only thing that kept me calm was the knowledge that it was within my power to end this situation. I knew that if I really couldn't carry on the dive, I could end it, ascend slowly and be floating on the surface in a matter of minutes.

Note: this is not the ideal way to end a dive, as technically you should always pause for three minutes at 5m deep to help ensure that any excess gas is out of your system, but all recreational diving is planned in such a way that you don't HAVE to make the stop if things go completely wrong.

Technical divers do not have this safety margin. To dive deeper, they accept that they will give up the option of ending the dive at any point, and that if they have a problem, it must be resolved under the water. (This is why they dive with two sets of working scuba gear, plus quite often extra tanks of gas in case of emergency.) This is a big part of the reason I think I may never technical dive. I respect people who do it mightily, but I am terrified of the idea of having a panic attack under the water without the option of safely removing myself from the situation inducing the panic. (This is also why part of NASA's astronaut training involves scuba diving.)

Which brings me back to Mars One. Imagine this situation for a moment. You're locked in a room the size of your living room with, say, three other people. You want to go outside. You can't. You start having a panic attack and pass out. And when you wake up ... you still can't go outside. You will never, in your entire life, see a tree, or an animal, or the sea, or anything familiar, ever again. You are sealed in that can for eternity, and there will never be a way out. Even regular astronauts in the International Space Station have the knowledge at the back of their heads that at some point, they'll be going back home.

No human beings have ever subjected themselves to this. To my mind, it's not a description of a scientific expedition, it's the plot of a horror movie. To quote another blog on this subject:

Over the decades, people in the colony will die and there is no guarantee that more people will come to replace them. In time, there will be only one person left on the entire planet. If that person is you, it will be very lonely indeed. You could be alone for ten or twenty years and possibly longer. It will just be you, marooned on an inhospitable rock out in the solar system, alone. That is truly the stuff of nightmares.

Ever since that incident in the Farne Islands, space movies scare me. I love them and still watch them, but when Sandra Bullock was floating around running out of oxygen, I was there. Space is unimaginably vast, inhospitable and empty.

And yet, funnily enough, I still do hope that at some point, my species will leave our home and travel somewhere else. Just because... well, I was brought up with Star Trek. Real space is much bigger and emptier than Gene Roddenberry made it seem, but it would truly be a remarkable thing if we could somehow find a way to travel outwards and establish ourselves on another world.

Just... not yet. And in a ship much bigger than a living room.

My Life Depends on Tiny Bits of Rubber

A picture of my regular, a Scubapro MK2

So, I went on an Equipment Servicing course yesterday at the dive shop. As is the way of these things, it was held on one of the most sunny days of the year, but we couldn't have known that when we booked it!

Actually, it was worth giving up four hours in the sun for. I spend a lot of time with my dive gear, and it's good to know how it works. Also, taking things to bits is fun, although slightly alarming. The tiny bits of rubber in question are two pieces of rubber, each half the size of a penny, which sit inside the regulator (the thing you breathe through) and form part of the valves within it. In other words, they ensure that the air comes through only when you want it to, and not when you don't.

Some people on the course found this a bit alarming, although this may have been induced by the fact we'd all been sniffing glue. (The sort kept in the workshop to stick ripped-up wetsuits back together - it's not a very big workshop.) I can relate (to the alarm, not the glue sniffing - my poison of choice is ethanol). At 35m deep, sometimes, it's better to think along the lines of "It works by magic, la la la, DIVE FAIRIES", than to know exactly how tiny and delicate the mechanism currently keeping you alive is. On the other hand, my gear is serviced by the same chap who ran the course, and he has clearly forgotten more about how dive gear works that I will ever know.

So, I can now take my scuba mask apart and wash it, which has hopefully got the mould off it. Tonight, I shall learn if I can put it back together again. 

Narked by Cold?

My buddy, finding Thunderbird Four 

Well my last dive was ...interesting. In the sense that the final part of it involved me learning first-hand that my ability to safely do a free ascent from a depth greater than 10m in my drysuit is something that needs work. Also, that I will never again forget to clip my SMB (Surface Marker Buoy) to my jacket - lesson learned. It would have been very helpful to have the cord as a visual reference point when trying to ascend. On the other hand, I was having enough to deal with the incessant "YOU ARE GOING UP TOO FAST STOP THAT NOW OR YOU WILL DAMAGE YOUR LUNGS YOU FLAMING IDIOT" beeps from the computer, the fact that I couldn't seem to balance the weight in my jacket and the air in my suit to be neither sinking nor rising, and the fact that my mask chose this moment to fill with water.

I distinctly remember having a second or so's brain space to think "Hmm. This isn't working out how I planned" in the middle of the "Well, shit, what now?" situation.

I solved the problem by dropping down a bit, stabilising, then ascending and swimming across to a nearby rock ledge at 6m, when I floated around doing a safety stop, clearing my mask and thinking baleful thoughts at my computer. And at my own stupidity. Luckily my buddy was fine, although he had his hands full shepherding some very new divers back to the exit point.

The second dive went much better, as myself and my buddy retraced our steps, and I practised a safe ascent, which went better. The only odd thing about that dive was that towards the end, my buddy signalled "I am cold, let's turn around" (he wears a wetsuit). We immediately turned round, but he suddenly paused, and picked up an object (I think a discarded metal ring from someone's dive kit) from the quarry floor. He then swam around for a while, looking for something, then carefully placed the object on the rock and swam off.

This is unusual behaviour, as most divers who have signalled "Cold" will start kicking with some speed once the end of the dive (and a nice cup of tea) is in site. I asked him about it later, and he commented "It just seemed really important to do that". We both pondered this, as this sort of fixation with completing a specific task, without thinking about the dive plan, is characteristic of nitrogen narcosis. However, we were only about 8m deep at the time, which is way too shallow for narcosis to kick in.

Was it exertion and cold causing a slight form of narcosis, or was it slight hypothermia? No way of knowing, but an issue to be aware of; that would be more of a problem if we were in the North Sea needing to get back to the ascent point, and then climb back into a boat.

Other than that, though, it was an interesting dive. And we found Thunderbird Four.

The Beadnell Car Park Song

I'd like to fill this space with a tale of diving derring-do. Unfortunately, the last time I went diving I nearly gave myself the bends. That tale can wait a bit longer.

Instead, here is a musical interlude, to be sung to the tune of "Human" by the Killers, and invented by my good friend J.

Beadnell is, of course, the site of many a North Sea dive. The car park has seen more semi-naked divers than the site of a very bad (and specialist) soft porn shoot.

"I did my best to notice
If the buoy was on the line
Up to the surface of the water
I was cold but I was fine.

"Sometimes I get nervous
When I see the film "Jaws"
Close your eyes, clear your ears
Hold the cord.

"Are we stupid?
Or are we divers?

My hands are freezing
My head is cold.

"And I'm on my knees
Searching for an O-ring*
In a car park
Near Beadnell."


* Small rubber ring, used to create a leak-proof seal between the valve on top of the tank, and the first stage of the regulator used to supply the breathing gas to the diver. Slightly smaller than a penny. Shares the common ability of all tiny mechanical objects essential to a complex process occuring, of flinging itself down the nearest drain at the least provocation. The likelihood of this occurring is expontentially increased if the diver in question doesn't have a spare.

We've Found Lord Lucan (Not Really)

Yesterday I bunked off work to go diving. If there's one thing that makes a dive more enjoyable, it's being able to take advantage of the sunny weather to do it. Bonus points if everyone else is stuck in the office. (It makes up for all the times you have to haul yourself out of bed on a rainy Sunday morning, whilst everyone else has a lie-in.)

We headed down to Capernwray Quarry in Lancashire. The weather has not been conducive to good sea diving recently (too stirred up), but several days' sunshine suggested the visibility in the quarry would be good. I wanted to try out the new gear I've bought to help with my drysuit; new fins and undersuit. I also wanted to swim through a plane. Capernwray Quarry recently bought and sunk an entire Cessna aircraft for people to swim through when diving, and the photos are amazing.

Unfortunately, my photos weren't going to be, because I managed to forget to attach my white slate onto my diving jacket. I need this so that the camera can take a reading at depth and figure out what white looks like at the depth I'm diving at, so that it can adjust the colour balance and compensate for the lack of red light. Annoyingly, the silicon pouch I put in the camera also failed; it must have been too old to absorb all the moisture in the air inside the camera housing, which led to condensation in the housing, crap photos on the second dive, and me having to put the camera in the airing cupboard to dry out when I got it home. That said, I took the photo above, so it wasn't a dead loss.

I also got to practice diving with the drysuit, which is coming along nicely. My buoyancy still isn't as good as it is with the semidry, but it's getting there. The new undersuit kept me, if not warm, then at least not cold. The new fins didn't give me cramp. Best of all, my buddies were a great bunch of people, and we got to swim around planes, oil rigs and sunken plastic horses (one of which is known as Lord Lucan, hence the headline), then hang out in the sunshine drinking coffee and eating banana cake.

This is a really fun way to spend a Friday.

Misunderstood Sharks

Got back from the GA conference of Unitarians, which was great. I'm considering starting a Unitarian-only blog, just for my posts about Unitarianism, and keeping this one for posts about cycling, diving and random diversions. Luckily, I will soon resume diving, so this blog will get a shitload more interesting.

The GA did provide proof that I can talk about diving anywhere, as I found a fellow Unitarian from Southampton who happens to be a marine biology student. She and I explained to a rapt audience (well, one that was eating its dinner and couldn't escape) that actually, divers love sharks, and they rarely attack humans (sharks, that is, not divers). There are only four species of shark that will regularly attack humans: tiger sharks, oceanic whitetips, bull sharks, and great whites. This is for the same reason that humans don't try to attack elephants; predators don't tend to prey on anything bigger than them unless they're hunting in packs. These four species are the only ones big enough to view something the size of a human as dinner. Humans also bear an unfortunate resemblance to the sharks' favourite prey, seals and turtles. The shark way of investigating anything is "take a bite, see if you like the taste". This is bugger-all consolation, I imagine, if a shark bites your arm off, spits it out, and you're swimming around trying to find your arm and stick it back on.

Although speaking of hunting in packs, there actually is a creature that does this; the Humboldt squid, nicknamed the "sea wolf" or the "red devil". This article gives an excellent recap of why they are scary, scary, creatures. If they lived longer than two years humans would have competition in the "top species" stakes.

I have swum with sharks, and they really are quite beautiful creatures, albeit not very smart. I hope someday to swim with the native British shark, the basking shark. The second-largest fish in the world (whale sharks are bigger), and a peaceful vegetarian. If you're going to swim with something 8m long weighing 20 tons, do not resemble dinner.

If You Start The Year By Jumping In The North Sea...

The team of happy divers wades out

 

... it can only improve from that point onwards.

Actually that's not quite true, since I prefer to do my New Year's Day sea swim wearing just about every single piece of neoprene I own. Myself and my buddies headed out over the St Mary's Island Causeway, to admiring gasps (or possibly gasps of disbelief that anyone is that mad) from onlookers. The tide was up to our calves, but this is not a problem when you have 8mm of neoprene on your legs and some sturdy diving boots.

I waved cheerfully to my mother, who hopefully was not having a minor panic attack at seeing one of her offspring jumping blithely into the waves, and jumped in after everyone else.

St Mary's Island swims are usually called "rough water swims", for the simple reason that the object of the dive is to jump off the side of the island, and swim round to the point where the waves break, and splash around in them until you get tired of having seawater up your sinuses, and head back for a coffee and a fresh doughnut from the van in the car park. (Another reason St Mary's is such a popular site for divers.)

There were no seals, but there were plenty of waves. We jumped around in the waves, struck silly poses on rocks (and were promptly knocked off them into the sea), and performed the diving exit technique known as "Undignified Scramble" to get out. Wading back over the thigh-high water on the causeway, I waved to my (possibly relieved) mother, and made the universal hand signal for "Have you got the Thermos?"

The Strangest Conversation I Have Ever Had About Paperweights

It looked a bit like this, but with a diving helmet.

I should have written this up last week. Whilst at the York Diving College, you are offered the chance to buy some of their souvenirs by viewing them in the display cabinet. (You're offered it several times - they really like you to know where the list for the souvenirs is. Which is fair, since running any form of diving operation can be insanely expensive.)

I already own more T-shirts than I need, but I did fancy a keyring. I also fancied a rather nice perspex paperweight with the image of an old-fashioned diving helmet inside it, as a Christmas present for AuntOfCyclingDiver, who was a diver long before I was. I wrote "keyring and big perspex box with old-fashioned diving helmet" on the list.

An hour later, just before we went in the decompression chamber, the lady running the bar appeared through the door and started handing out the souvenirs and collecting the cash. All went smoothly, until she got to me.

"Are you the lady who ordered the paperweight?"

"Yes, if we're talking about a big clear block with a diving helmet in it, that was me."

"Sorry, I'm afraid we're out of them. The supplier's dead."

I couldn't help it. I laughed. Which is awful, but it was the sheer unexpectedness of it. I was expecting "We've run out" or "We don't make them any more."

"Okay, is there any chance you could sell me the one in the display cabinet?"

"Afraid not. Sorry."

"Okay." [beat] "If you don't mind me saying, maybe if it's not for sale, you could take the paperweight out of the display cabinet."

"Okay. Well, you know how the light in the cabinet doesn't work?"

"Ah." [beat] "Is the key lost?"

"Afraid so. Sorry."

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if all the locksmiths in North Yorkshire were also dead, but fortunately diplomacy prevailed.

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.

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.

Sea-Flowers (Back to the Inverted World)

A piece I wrote for my church's Flower Communion.

Flowers are marvels, and beautiful in two ways. Firstly, they are beautiful simply to look at, but secondly, they are beautifully designed for their function, of allowing the plant to reproduce itself, and create the next generation of flowers. Insects and flowers exist together in harmony; the insect transferring pollen from one flower to another, and receiving its reward in the form of nectar. Yet there are no sea-living insects, no water-bees to transfer pollen or its equivalent between undersea flowers. So are there no flowers beneath the waves?

 

This is a plumrose sea-anemone, taken at St Abbs. Sea-anemones, of course, are named from land anemones…

Because it is very difficult for a human eye to look at a sea-anemone, and not immediately think “It’s a flower!”

The sea-anemone is fascinating, because it inverts the relationships we are used to with land-flowers. As most people know, it’s actually an animal, with a foot, a long tube-shaped body, and the familiar fringe of tentacles that make it look so flower-like under the water.

As most people also know, the sea-anemone’s behaviour is less like that of a land flower, and more like a Venus fly-trap. It stays still most of the time, but should a small fish or crustacean come near its tentacles, the anemone will swiftly sting it and eat it for dinner.

 Yet some creatures are immune to this; clownfish or porcelain crabs. Like a bee on a rose, the clownfish, or crab, and the anemone live together, each providing food and protection for the other.   

A highly-prized photo for divers is to capture an image of a clownfish or crab lurking within its anemone home; I haven’t managed it, but others have! In addition to its larger house-guest, each anemone contains many single-celled algae within it. The anemone provides the algae with a safe home, access to sunlight and protection from predators, and the algae provides its host with food and oxygen.

Anemones are not the only “sea-flowers”. Another beautiful animal is the feather-duster tubeworm, which feeds on particles filtered from the water around it with its long filaments:

The Book of British Marine Life comments that “There are few finer sights in our waters than a group of plumrose anemones swaying in the current”, which I agree with.  

Like so many things in nature, it is a marvellous sight. Above the waves, the flowers and insects exist side-by-side, each benefitting the other. Beneath the waves, the anemones may not be plants, but like their namesakes on land, they too exist as part of a marvellous web of life. I am truly lucky to be able to see a bit more of that web of life than many other people, and I hope you’ve enjoyed me sharing some of it with you.

I Still Like Magic Malta (2013)

Having revisited Malta from 2012, I find myself thinking back to 2013, when I headed off to the small island in the Mediterranean with a different bunch of divers, since the Dive Centre trip was full. As I make a point of remaining uninvolved in dive centres politics (it's one reason I will never be a Divemaster or Instructor), this did not cause any problems. Again, the memories have boiled down to the following....

• Driving the most knackered-looking Jeeps in Malta. I don't normally drive overseas, and I've never driven a Jeep before. My confidence was not improved when I realised it had a manual choke, which I have never seen before in my life. On the other hand, in fairness, no-one is going to rent a good Jeep to divers, who will only drive it down muddy paths and sandy beaches, and cover it in dripping wet dive gear. Eventually, I did get the hang of pulling the choke out when starting it, and managed to master planning turns some time in advance. (At least our Jeep did start after about three tries. Another group had a Jeep that had to be push started by driving it in circles round the car park near the hotel, cheered on by the watching divers, with another Jeep pushing it along until the engine turned over. Pure Chuckle Brothers.)  Fortunately, the great thing about driving in Malta is that if you drive like a maniac, everyone just thinks you must be a local. As I parked the Jeep at the end of my first day driving it, someone asked if I'd locked the steering wheel. I replied that I didn't know it had a steering lock. I was told to look under the driver's seat. Under the seat, there was a thick length of chain bolted to the Jeep's floor, and a huge padlock. I stuck the chain through the steering wheel, padlocked it, wondered briefly who on earth would be desperate enough to nick this Jeep, and went off for a pint.
• Learning that how fit someone looks, or is, doesn't necessarily mean you can guess how fast they'll go through the air. I had one buddy who was slim and went dancing for a hobby, but still sucked down air like a thirsty man with a pint of cold beer. After we ended up with him "borrowing" some of my spare air (via the spare "Octopus" mouthpiece on my tank), as we headed back from having not seen the Um el-Faroud wreck due to his running low on air, we agreed that henceforth he should have a 15L tank. He got one, we paid a man with a boat to take us out to the wreck the next day, and all was well. (Except that we managed to miss the entrance to the harbour with the exit steps, and had to surface and swim back to the steps. Few experiences quite match the unique sensation of surfacing in a unfamiliar sea with no boat cover and thinking "Bugger, I don't recognise that very steep cliff AT ALL". Never have I been so glad to see a fisherman, who took a minute off from catching grouper to wave an arm in the direction of the harbour. It took fifteen minutes' swimming, but that could be worse.)
• We couldn't dive the Blue Hole as the water was too rough, so did the Inland Sea of Gozo instead - the one with the tunnel. We carefully made a plan; swim through the tunnel, stay at 30m, and explore the ledges on the other side before heading back. We got through the tunnel, and everyone - whether through narcosis or over-excitement - completely forget the plan and started chasing a grouper deeper into the sea. Outside the tunnel, the sea bed slopes away and keeps on sloping; it's a popular site for technical divers, and it is here that the Savage Toilet of Gozo was encountered. The sea bed drops to 60m, so this was not going to end well if people went deeper. I actually managed my deepest ever depth on this dive. It would have been nice to have planned that, rather than have it be the result of dropping deeper quickly to avoid getting kicked in the head by a grouper-hunting diver! After that, I decided the best thing I could do was not make things worse, and level off at 30m whilst my Divemaster buddy G went off to round everyone up, check the air, and herd them back through the tunnel. G did his thing, then started looking around frantically. I realised he couldn't see me as I was directly above him, and got out my trusty rattle. I rattled away, he looked up and spotted me, mimed wiping sweat from his brow, and we headed back through the tunnel. It was actually a good dive - the Tunnel is world-famous. We headed through it, pausing for a safety stop and a few last grouper photos. As we surfaced, there came the plaintive wail from behind me "Has anyone seen a GoPro? Mine's not on my mask any more..."
• Hunting for a GoPro camera not much bigger than a box of matches, in a very large inland sea with the visibility of sandy milk. As G said afterwards, if we had come straight out instead of searching, the next result would have been the same, except we'd have had time for an extra cup of tea and some more chips. On the plus side, I did encounter another grouper which posed happily for me, so the search wasn't entirely wasted.
• Waiting patiently in the tea shop for the two divers who had tried to dive the Blue Hole to return. One of the golden rules of diving, and life, is "Don't go anywhere you can't get back out of". They had got into the water with us, swum round to the Blue Hole, realised the conditions were too rough to actually get out of the water, run low on air, and had to surface swim all the way back round to the Inland Sea. It took them an hour. We were pleased to get them back safely - and they were known as "the swimmers" for the rest of the trip.
• Diving the Karwela, a wreck on Gozo I didn't see last time around. The Karwela is one of three wrecks off the coast of Gozo near the main ferry terminal. The most famous sits next to the Karwela; it's the Xlendi, which is very pleasant if you like looking at the bottom of a ship - it turned over on the way down. The Xlendi is just about diveable for a recreational diver, but it's mostly popular with techies, who like to take several tanks, a compass and a reel of navigation line down there, and go have a poke around inside it. The advantage of this is that the Karwela is dead easy to find; you just swim out, put your face in the water, and swim along following the steady stream of techie divers underneath you swimming out to the Xlendi. That was a really, really fun dive. 
• Attempting to get the most knackered jeeps in Malta up the very, very steep hill track that leads to and from the Karwela dive site. We got the most experienced driver, R, to take over for this bit (he was excused driving duties for the holiday on the grounds of it being his day job as a taxi driver). The only way to do it was the classic "put your foot down on the flat to get momentum, and DON'T STOP" - not easy on a steep hill with three divers plus all their gear. On the other hand, we did laugh ourselves silly as the two lads in the car in front of us tried three times to get up the hill. Eventually, they rolled the car back down, one of them got out, and the other put his foot down. The car got up the hill, pursued frantically by its former occupant (possibly having visions of walking back to the ferry terminal).
• Meeting Big Sy, a cheerful fellow with a full-face diving mask, the build of a rhino, and the amiable personality of a man who goes through life knowing that everyone who might cause him trouble takes one look at him and realises that he could probably put his thumb on top of their head and push them effortlessly into the ground. Big Sy was (is!) a very good diver, and provided one of the more memorable moments of the trip. As we circled the Coralita, we found an octopus, which darted under a huge rock. Big Sy took a look at the rock, shrugged, picked up the rock, and threw it to one side. I swear til this day that the octopus looked surprised.
• Diving the X127 / Coralita. We were there in November, not October as in 2012, and the weather was getting rough. On the final day, we stood under the dive shop awning, peering out at the torrents of water and pondering what to do. Some peeled off to spend the day in the pub. The rest of us decided to get one more dive in, and headed off to the only site we could get into - the Coralita. This small landing craft sits at 20m inside Valetta harbour, where it was sunk by the Nazis. To get to it, we had to battle our way through the floods, caused by some truly torrential rain. It was the first time on Malta I'd been really grateful for the Jeep, which ploughed through the water as though it was nothing, whilst around us cars floundered. The dive was a good 'un, with plenty of fish, along as we shivered our way through getting changed in the wind and rain, it was weirdly reminiscent of diving back home. Just like being back home, we remedied the cold with a hot chocolate and a sandwich at a nearby cafe, where I pulled out my Malta dive guide, looked up the wreck, and made a nice realisation. The X127 had come from the same place we had. It was built in Tyneside.

I Like Magic Malta

This post's a blast from the past. Right now, I'd rather dwell on happier times, and look forward to happy times to come, specifically when I take myself, my diving kit and my holiday savings off to Malta in October, where sunken boats and much beer await. (I could write a post on how my studies are going, but I think it is fair to say that the only people who really give a monkey's about the training needs of managers in my organisation are a) the managers, b) the trainers, c) me. None of whom read this blog.)

I've had two trips to Malta; one in 2012, one in 2013. This is 2012's highlights*. Funny how, if you leave it a while, you realise what you took away from the experience:

• Learning that every trip really needs one person whom everyone else can privately agree is a bit, well, unique. Ours was P. P wore his wetsuit and a straw hat at all times. Wearing a wetsuit is not odd if you're going diving. It is odd if you are out of the water for an hour having lunch, and it's 35 degrees C in the shade. 
• Learning that you should not give the person everyone else thinks of as a bit, well, unique, the map when trying to drive to a dive site on Gozo you've never been to before. Gozo is the sister island of Malta, and home to one of the Mediterranean's most famous dive sites, the Blue Hole of Gozo (picture above). It is a running joke among visitors to Malta that the Maltese took the road signs down to confuse the Nazis, and never bothered to put them back up again. Picture the scene. I'm in a car with five divers, one of whom is trying desperately to navigate his way through Gozo's twisting roads in an overloaded Volvo, three of whom are clinging on for dear life, and the fifth is P, who was staring at the map with an expression like an alien trying to comprehend Crufts. I, the driver, asked harriedly as he approached a roundabout, "Do I turn right here?" P looked up, and uttered in a tone of mild interest: "You can turn right if you want to turn right." The second time this happened, the iron entered the soul of one of the other divers, L, who leaned forward, fixed P with a gimlet stare, and explained: "You've got the map, man! The way this works is that YOU tell HIM where he needs to go!"
• Exploring the Blue Hole of Gozo, when we finally got there. It is truly a unique dive. Like the Blue Hole of Dahab, you enter a blue pool, descend about 25m, and swim out into a stunning underwater landscape. It is one of those moments where the answer to the question: "Was it worth learning to dive?" is answered "Yes", for the rest of your life.
• Learning that, no matter how much you like someone, by the time they've uttered their catchphrases "I Like Magic Malta" and "Hey Guys", five times a day for a week, you will want to silence them by buying them a drink at every opportunity. 
• Night diving at the Popeye Village (Anchor Bay) site, and spotting a really enormous sea snail.

• Seeing a cuttlefish for the first time. 
• Learning that diving twice a day in the sunshine, then spending an evening in the pub with your mates, is a truly excellent way to spend a holiday. 
• Malta is nice, and has cheap pizza.
• Malta also has a load of old Arriva buses plying its streets, which can make things confusing... you step out of the airport, and the first thing you see is an Arriva bus pulling up on the left hand side of the road. It's hard not to wonder "Holy crap, did the pilot turn the plane round in mid-air?"
• Getting your own beer fountain in the pub sounds like a better idea than it actually is. 
• Diving the Um el-Faroud - one of the biggest sunken ships in the Mediterranean - really is all it's cracked up to be. 
• Comino's Blue Lagoon is an amazing sight. So are the nearby caves, although they are the site of one of my more alarming dive stories. I was happily trolling along in the "Fish Bowl" area, a shallow dive site popular for an end-of-day dive, when an anchor suddenly thudded into the sand a foot away from me. At the time, I just thought "Ooops!" and sculled off to the edge of the Fish Bowl. Only later did it occur to me that this story could have had a very different ending.

 More tales of anchors and beers coming soon!
* yup, this is the same holiday when I discovered the hard way (i.e. 18m down) that my inflatable BCD was leaking air.