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.

Back Very Soon

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...

I Thought There Was A Light At The End of the Tunnel

And it turned out to be some bugger with a torch and some more work, hence the absence of blogging fun. Believe me, I know this blog is littered with half-finished tales, but I shall not give up. With the patience of my friends and enough caffeine I can do anything, so just watch this space until I'm back from holiday in a couple of weeks, and there shall be completed tales, fun and photos. Promise!

Boat of Puking Divers, Part the First

I’ve been diving a lot recently, hence the absence of blogging activity. I’m now a Rescue Diver following a recent trip to Bute, of which more shortly. I’m also doing my Emergency First Response course, basically a First Aid course run through the my local diving centre. Always good for laugh when you have divers pretending to be casualties and two of our senior instructors, J and T, taking the class. T actually works in the health profession and has had cause to do CPR for real on three occasions.

None of them worked out in the way anyone hoped, but apparently this is not uncommon with CPR. (Should this sort of thing happen to you, try to keel over as near to a defibrillator as possible. Apparently the odds of being successfully revived if your heart stops plummet drastically after about six minutes regardless of the quality of the CPR being performed. This little First Aid bulletin brought to you care of CyclingDiver.)

As well as Fun with EFR videos (if you have a macabre sense of humour, the EFR Training Video is not unlike an episode of Casualty with voiceovers), I’ve been jumping off a boat into the North Sea on a regular basis. Specifically, the Scimitar out of Eyemouth harbour. I rather like boat dives as they involve slightly less scrabbling up and down over rocks in full diving kit. My full kit weighs around 25 kilos, and whilst I’m reasonably fit this is still quite a lot of weight to be carrying around.

Instead, you simply stride off the boat, go for the dive, then surface, scrabble onto the boat’s trail line (the rope along the side), haul yourself along the side and stand on the boat lift, which lifts you and deposits you back on the deck just in time for a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.

At least, this is the theory. My most recent dive was slightly less harmonious than this might suggest. Not, I must add, due to any fault of the excellent captain of the Scimitar, but due to the marvellousness (or lack thereof) of the British weather. Cold and rainy. It rained when we set off from Newcastle, it rained whilst we were driving up there, it rained whilst we were unloading our dive gear from the car to the boat, it rained whilst we were getting changed, and it rained whilst we were on the boat. This did not promise good visibility (see the photo for what the view was like under the water).

Whilst it is true that our hobby involves getting wet, it is a mistake to assume that this means divers are impervious to rain (although it must be said that a wetsuit, semidry suit or dry suit is an excellent choice for standing around in the rain). When you’re in the water, you’re no more aware of the water around you than you are of the air around you in the air world. Having cold rain blowing in your face is an entirely different experience.

Anyway, we bumped out into the chilly waters of Eyemouth, and jumped off the boat to begin our first drift dive. (A drift dive is where you drift along with the current.) Always fun, especially when, on the way up, you looked out of the window at the grey fog rolling over the sea, thought “It’ll be fun for the captain trying to spot us in this”, and then thought “Did I put my surface marker buoy* and reel back onto my buoyancy jacket after I took the jacket in to be serviced? No, I did not.” My strobe** had also packed in after it flooded on a recent shore dive, although I did have a smaller automatic strobe stuck on my jacket shoulder.

This did not bode well.

To be continued...


* Surface marker buoy, or SMB : A six-foot inflatable fluorescent orange tube which is filled with air from the diver’s tank (usually using the spare “octopus” mouthpiece, or sometimes the diver’s exhaled breath), either on the surface or whilst the diver is submerged. Regarded as essential safety kit for boat diving as it enables the boat captain to find you in poor visibility or if you surface further away from the boat than intended, due to currents or getting lost. The reel is attached to the buoy when deploying it at depth, so that you can stay linked to it!

** Strobe: Flashing light, usually worn on the diver’s shoulder, to enable other divers to find you underwater in poor visibility. Also used on the surface when night diving. Most divers I know favour the sort made by Beaver Sports, which combines a torch and strobe and comes in handy if your main torch packs in during a dive. Also regarded as pretty much essential safety kit when doing UK dives: the vis is not always, or even often, awful, but you might as well take the strobe in case you need it, since it weighs almost nothing.

Back Under The Water At Beadnell and Eyemouth (Republican Dive)

Done a lot of diving recently: shore dives at Beadnell, and boat dives at Eyemouth. I wonder if other divers go through their dives thinking "I could have done that dive differently..." Probably. Then again, I've only just done 60 dives, so I'm still serving my apprenticeship. I'm also still in the process of getting all my gear set up, since I now have quite a lot of it. Fortunately, I have good diving buddies to help me on the way!

Highlight of the dives at Eyemouth were some rather pretty corkwing wrasse, and some amazing diving seabirds. We were 10m down, and they were swimming around us like penguins! Sadly, the camera battery had flattened itself by then, so you'll have to take my word for it. Here's a picture of a plumrose anemone to make up for it.

Visibility at Beadnell on 29th April 2011 was not great, but it was a sunny day and carried with it the inestimable happiness of not being stuck indoors watching the Royal Wedding. I have no particular dislike for Wills'n'Kate, but I don't know them, either. The vis was awful, but the dive was redeemed by my dive buddy K's sharp-eyed spotting of a scorpionfish. I've never had a chance to take a photo of one before, so here it is!

Spring Beneath the Waves, Part 2

...This is, perhaps, the aspect of diving most difficult to convey to those who do not dive. Not only do we enter another world, we gain new abilities within it. We float weightlessly, our bodies hovering within the water, drifting elegantly past rocks and reefs with steady kicks of our reefs. Whereas when we swim or snorkel on the surface, we can only very temporarily experience what a fish experiences before the need to breathe draws us back to the air world, a diver swims among our fellow creatures as one of them.

Perhaps the only comparable sensation to the weightlessness a diver experiences when submerged is that experienced by astronauts who have left Earth’s gravity field, but the underwater world is very much of this Earth. The other question people ask British divers (the first one being “Don’t you get cold?”) is “Can you see anything down there?”

They would, I think, be very surprised to learn that when we return to the sea in the spring, the underwater world is teeming with colour and life. Beneath us, tiny hermit crabs in brown shells scuttle about on their orange and white legs. Their bigger relatives, the green velvet swimming crab and orange edible crab, walk quickly across the pale sea floor, or wave their claws at the curious faces peering in at their rocky homes in the reef. Dark purple and orange kelp forests cover the rocks, providing homes for small silver and green fish to dart in and out of.

A diver armed with a torch may even find one of our most striking creatures, the common lobster, hiding in a hole in the rocks. An impressive sight, with their navy blue armour and bright red antennae, they are rarely as pleased to see us as we are to see them. Perhaps most unexpectedly of all, pink and purple are colours often seen beneath the waves. Vivid pink rocks litter the seabed, purple and orange sponges grow across them, and an observant diver will often spot an elegant purple starfish clinging to the rocks!

Spring beneath the waves is a time of renewal. We re-enter our other world with joy, greeting again the familiar sights of crabs scuttling beneath the waves, kelp swaying in the back-and-forth of the tides, and small starfish making their homes upon the rocks. At this stage in the year, most animals are smaller than the size they will eventually reach in the warmer waters of summer, and we have yet to see the familiar summer sight of a large lion’s mane or purple jellyfish drifting in the current with its passengers of small silver fish. Elsewhere in the sea the seal pups born the previous autumn will be adult seals now, playing among the rocks and wrecks of the Farne Islands.

Eventually, of course, we must return to our own world. Even the large volume of air compressed into the steel bottle on my back will only last for so long. We did not evolve to live here, but we are very privileged to become a part of this world. I once heard of a diver who dived because, he said, it was the only place he became convinced of the existence of a Creator. Perhaps for him, as for me, the encounter with another world helped him shed the old habits of mind we acquire through long familiarity with our world, and look again at the miraculous complexity and beauty of life.