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.

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.

Attack of the Imaginary Toilet

Divers exiting the Inland Sea tunnel

Went back in the water yesterday. Even if it was only Lake Ellerton, it was wonderful. The diving instincts haven't rotted completely, the diving equipment hasn't stopped working, and I still love my drysuit. I'm sure that eventually the novelty of getting out of the water and being (mostly) dry and warm will wear off sometime, but not yet. I really, really, don't miss being cold and tired after my dives.

I also heard a funny story from one of my dive buddies, who's an instructor. We'll call him C. C was over in Malta some months ago with another instructor, D, and another diver taking the "Tec 50" course in deep diving with technical gear - we'll call him C2. C, D and C2 were planning to dive the Stubborn the following day, a WWII submarine that sits off the Maltese coast at around 55m. As such, it's well out of my range (40m max), but the three divers were planning to do this as a technical dive with decompression stops.

50m is regarded as the point at which pretty much everyone will have some level of nitrogen narcosis, although the extent varies from person to person. "The narks" are when the increased amount of nitrogen in your bloodstream from breathing compressed gas makes you feel as though you're drunk. Since you take in more gas at depth (the increased pressure at depth compresses the gas, so you're breathing more concentrated gas the deeper you go), narcosis is a risk for deeper dives. It's not actually harmful in itself, unless it causes you to do something stupid, but the effects vary from person to person, in much the same way that some drunks are Happy Drunks, others are Angry Drunks, and some people are Sad Drunks.

Because of this, C2 wanted to do a dive to 50m to see how the narcosis would affect him. They set out from the Inland Sea in Gozo towards the Azure Window, a dive where you swim through a natural tunnel in the rock, and come out over a seabed that drops down to about 50-60m. From there you turn to the side and swim along the coastline towards the Azure Window (see picture).

C, C2 & D completed the swim through and descended to about 50m. C checked his compass, pointed towards the right direction, and set off. After a minute, he looked around to check for the other two, and saw C2 swimming off fast in the opposite direction. C and D went after him, retrieved him, ascended to allow the effects of the narcosis to dissipate, then finished the dive.

When they were back on the surface, C2's first words were: "Did you see the toilet!"

"No."

"There was a toilet."

They looked at each other. It's not unknown for divers to encounter sunken toilets from shipwrecks, but this dive doesn't have one.

"No, there was no toilet."

"There was a toilet! It was chasing me and snapping its lid at me! That's why I swam away!"

It turned out that C2 had overdone it the night before, and spent a fair part of the previous night hugging the toilet bowl. Apparently this left a sufficiently deep impression on his psyche that, as soon as he hit 50m, he felt he was being attacked by an (imaginary) toilet. (Author's note: I wonder if he actually saw a moray eel? They swim around opening and closing their jaws, as it's how they breathe...)

The tale of the Savage Toilet is now passing into diving legend. When I'm in Malta in two weeks, I shall be checking to see if it's there.

Malta Day 1 – Accidents and Emergencies, Part the Fourth

 And indeed the Tugboat Rozi is a splendid wreck, one I’d really recommend to anyone. It’s mostly intact and has lots of fish, plus the cabin is open for that inevitable “diver sitting on a toilet underwater” photo that everyone likes to take. At one point my buddy spotted a barracuda in the distance. Best of all, I handled the depth, staying mostly relaxed and happy. I felt a little strange at one point, stopped, gently rose a metre or two, and it went away. Eventually, inevitably, our computers began to count down the minutes until we started to reach the ‘five minutes til you go into deco(1)’ moment. 

And this is where things went a wee bit wrong.

Firstly, the current. As we headed back towards our planned exit point, we encountered a strong current which kept pushing us back towards the ship. For most of us, this was an annoyance but not a serious problem; we dropped down slightly to get out of the worst of the current. (Currents tend to be strongest the nearer you get to the surface of the water.) 

Unfortunately, this was not an option for two of our number, who were running low on air and for whom dropping longer would have meant risking running too low. They stayed shallower to conserve air, and found themselves being pushed further and further backwards. My buddy, a Divemaster, noticed this, and slowed down to watch to see if they were okay. The rest of the group, alas, didn’t notice this and kept going. I did my best to keep my eyes on both the struggling two divers, my buddy, and the rest of the group, but eventually reached the point where the group had simply vanished into the blue.

The two running-low-on-air divers eventually appeared to decide to surface, and myself and my buddy tried to decide what to do next. We followed our compasses in the direction the group had taken, and eventually found ourselves near the exit point next to the lighthouse. (Again, props to the excellent maps in the "A Guide to Shore Diving the Maltese Islands" book by Peter Lemon – I saw several metal beams in the water near some rocks, and instantly recognised them from the drawing in the book as the wreckage which indicates you have found the exit.)

We looked up to see the waves crashing overhead. 6m down, the water wasn’t moving too much, but it was clearly a different story on the surface. We’d have to go around the rocky outcrop to the planned exit point at Suzie’s Pool, which, being more sheltered, would be much calmer.

I checked my air (a bit low but not dire), my computer (which was doing a safety stop for me), and my buddy. And then realised what my buddy was staring at…

(1) ‘Going into deco’ is divers’ shorthand for staying down either long enough or deep enough (or both) that you have to do a decompression stop. In other words, you have stayed under long enough that your body has absorbed so much nitrogen (from the compressed air divers breathe) that you cannot ascend directly to the surface without an unacceptable risk of getting the bends.

This is when the nitrogen dissolved in your body tissues “bubbles out” destructively on ascent, due to the decreased pressure as you ascend to shallower depths. “Bubbling out” happens on all dives, but if you have too large an amount of nitrogen in your tissues and / or you ascend too quickly, the bubbles are so large that instead of being safely transported through the bloodstream into the lungs and exhaled, they become trapped and damage your tissues and circulatory system.

When this has happened, you must do a decompression stop, where you ascend to a certain depth and stay there until you’ve exhaled sufficient of the nitrogen stuck in your system that you can ascend further without an unacceptable risk of getting the bends. This is a regular part of technical diving. Technical divers, however, carry extra gas and an entirely separate scuba breathing system with them, so that in the event of one of their sets of breathing gas failing, they can switch to the other and still safely carry out decompression. The extra gas is also calcuated to last for the length of the dive plus decompression stops and a safety margin. Finally, they carry diving computers which can calculate decompression stops based on the divers’ time and depth during the dive. 

Recreational divers, of which I am one, do not carry this amount of gear as it’s not needed for dives without decompression stops. (The extra gear for technical diving is expensive, heavy, needs much more maintenance, and you have to do a lot of training and learn extra skills before you can safely dive with it. Each diver makes their own choice about whether the extra time and expense is worth it for what they want to achieve when they dive.) This means that, should you have to do a decompression and you have problems with your breathing gear or run low on gas, you face the choice every diver plans to avoid: run out of gas or get the bends. Neither is desirable.

Malta Day 1 – Accidents and Emergencies, Part the Third

Spot the octopus!

We pored over the excellent dive book, planning our dive on the Tugboat Rozi, just off Cirkewwa Point. In my case, with a slight residual anxiety, although the BCD problem had been solved swiftly by one of the divemasters. C took one look at the valve, unscrewed it, fished out the rubber seal and gave it a clean. He then screwed the valve back together and popped down to Suzie’s pool to test it out. Result: one working BCD. I was happy about this, but was also somewhat mindful of the fact that a dive to a wreck which sits at 35m on the seabed isn’t a good place to lose buoyancy. Still, I had faith in C.


Just as well, since I was slightly nervous about this. I’ve recently been getting the scuba yips about diving deep, legacy of a unfortunate incident in the Farne Islands where I overbreathed my reg at 21m and nearly had a panic attack. My best guess is that I’m a little sensitive to the extra work and noise of breathing through the reg at depth. Even with the breathing resistance dialled down, air at 30m is four times as dense as air at the surface, creating extra resistance, and I think it’s that which gives me the yips. 

On the other hand, part of me really, really wanted to do the dive and prove I could do it (and that the ‘Deep Diver’ speciality card I hold isn’t just there to prop up a wobbly table). Malta is where you go to see wrecks, and I really wanted to see this one. And so, along with everyone else, I kitted up and trudged to the entrance point by the lighthouse. As I strapped on my fins and attempted to rinse out my mask in a nearby rock pool without having the tide snatch it out of my hands, I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s a fair way down”. 

Never mind. I stuck the reg in my mouth, inflated the BCD, took a few breath, and giant-strode off the edge to join the others. A quick exchange of hand-signals, and we breathed out, deflated our jackets, and sunk into the sea. At four metres, I tested the BCD with a quick puff of air to slow my descent, turned my head, and watched in happiness as the air failed to stream out of the valve. I kicked forward, then paused, and found myself hanging effortlessly in the water column. 

Problem solved. I set off after the others, keeping pace with my buddy and staying shallow to maximise bottom time. En route, I took a white balance reading from my slate; the camera worked just fine. Five minutes in, the wreck loomed slowly out of the blue, surrounded by fish. 

This was what I’m come to Malta for!

Malta Day 1 – Accidents and Emergencies, Part the Second

We descended gently, or in my case swiftly, to the bottom of the wall nearby and commenced exploring. This should have been a nice, gentle dive with lots of fish and interesting life on the wall to see. 

Except that I still couldn’t swim properly. It felt like I was being pulled downward. Fortunately, we weren’t near a drop-off, but I just couldn’t get buoyant. I filled my jacket, and filled my jacket, and then became aware of a deeply, deeply unwelcome sound behind my head. The sound of escaping air. 

Bugger.

I turned my head as far as I could, and there was the problem; a steady stream of leaking bubbles from the dump valve on my right shoulder. I swiftly signalled my buddy, indicated a problem, wrote on the slate “Leaking valve?” and pointed. My buddy shook her head, possibly because by this point all the air had leaked out and there was either no stream of bubbles, or a very small one. 

We continued our dive for five minutes with me hoping that my buddy was right. Alas, this was not the case. I was having to drag myself across the rocks. I checked my air; down to 110bar from a full 12-litre tank (230). I’d have expected to be at around 180-170 by now, given the depth. At this point, my oh-shit-ometer started going “BEEEEEP” as I stared down at the sea floor, 22m down, and had the deeply uncomfortable thought that if I sunk down to it I might not be able to get back up again on my own without ditching my weights. This was not an irretrievable situation, but it needed dealing with now. Time to end the dive.

I practised a skill I’ve come to realise recently I need more of, that of being assertive with my buddy. I resignalled “Problem”, pointed at the valve, then pointed at the SPG. My buddy, being familiar with my levels of air consumption, realised the problem. We swam off, or in my case lumbered off, to find the rest of the gang. Alas, everyone had swum off in front of us; always a fun situation when you can’t swim fast and you need to catch up to indicate a problem. Ten minutes later, I stationed myself on a rock, whilst my buddy attempted to get the divemasters’ attention. 

I managed to make eye contact with one of them (also, coincidentally, the same instructor who taught me on my Rescue Course). I signalled “Problem” and “Come here”, probably rather emphatically. I then printed on the slate “BCD VALVE LEAKING, CAN’T STAY BUOYANT”. We agreed to swim back together, ascending slowly to about six metres. At this depth the 5mm semidry suit plus the lighter tank and what little air I could keep in the BCD were enough to maintain buoyancy. 

We paddled slowly along, with me keeping a wary eye on my SPG, and trying not to think about the fact that I had no fine control over my buoyancy, and if I went to the surface, no means of keeping myself float apart from my ability to swim, and my semidry suit. (Orally inflating a leaking BCD being an exercise in pointlessness.) I thought about all the functions you need your dive gear to perform both during a routine dive and in an emergency, which you never realise you relying on it to be able to do unless for any reason it can’t do it. 

Nevertheless, we made it uneventfully back to the exit point and paddled back out, trying not to get knocked off our feet by the surf, which was getting up a wee bit. I shed my gear, waited for everyone else to emerge, and started planning a) lunch and b) what on earth I was going to do for the next dive.

Malta Day 1 – Accidents and Emergencies

Recently I spent eight days in Malta, courtesy of my friendly local dive shop, with ten fellow divers. We explored the island and drank much beer.

I'd like to point out that any bugger-ups recounted here are entirely my own fault. No blame attaches to anyone else! So, onward...

The Diving Holiday in Malta team’s first day was spent at Marfa Point, aka Cirkewwa. About an hour’s drive from St Peter’s Bay, it’s where the Gozo ferry leaves from, and also has several excellent dives in its own right. We had our trusty guide to Malta’s diving, penned by Peter Lemon, whom we bumped into in the Dive Shop later in the week. (I’m not being sponsored by him or anything, but if you want a guide to diving in Malta, buy his. It has excellent directions, including compass bearings, good descriptions, and undersea maps that actually make sense when you get under the water.)

Should have been a doddle of a check-out dive, following by an interesting dive on the wreck of the Tugboat Rozi, right? 

Well…

Our first dive was to be around the area known as “Suzie’s Pool”, an area often used for training dives, and thus a logical place to have our first “check-out” dive of the holiday. Always a good idea to test out everyone’s skills and equipment before the more challenging dives. In my case, it was going to be particularly useful, since I had with me my old BCD, which I now use for travelling. The new one is more up-to-date, comfortable and ergonomic, fits over my drysuit, has integrated weight pockets – and also weighs a ton, so it no longer comes with me on holiday unless I have extra baggage allowance. I’d had the old BCD serviced back in February, hadn’t used it since June, and had meant to have a pool dive with it the week before we left, but life got in the way.

I kitted up with 6kg of lead, figuring that since I was wearing the 5mm full-length suit of my two-piece semidry suit – but not the jacket, hood, neoprene socks, 5mm gloves or rash vest that complete the rest of my diving ensemble back in the UK – I could knock 3kg off what I needed. I’d been diving on 6kg in Crete earlier in the year with the same set-up. 

We slithered into Suzie’s Pool, in some cases literally as the sea was vigorously splashing onto the rocks* and swam out to the drop-off. Or in my case, didn’t, as I seemed to be pinned onto the rocks. I signalled my buddy and wrote on the slate I always carry with me: “Too much weight.” 

Looking back, this should have been a clue. Even if 6kg was a little on the heavy side taking into account the amount of neoprene I’d lost from my usual diving set-up, I’ve dived with that BCD on 9kg of lead and a lot more gear, and it can produce roughly 20kg-worth of lift. Even if I was over-weighted, it should have been possible to compensate by adding a bit more air to the jacket.

Still, buddy and the nearby dive leader fiddled about with my weight belt and removed a weight, always an interesting experience when all your weight is on your belt. Fortunately, with only 3 minutes’ dive time and 4m of water above my head, even a buoyant ascent would probably not have done me too much damage. Even more fortunately, this didn’t happen: the dive leader tucked the weight into his BCD pocket, and we set off into the blue.

And then things got worse. 


To be continued…


* Yes. This will become an important detail later on on this blog.