A Friday Evening Dive
Driving down in time for the Friday evening dive off Redeemer the sun was yet again shining, promising another brilliant sunny weekend. The plan was to dive The Volney. I had dived it about a month before on a Yorkshire Divers gig and had managed to get a few good pictures before, so was looking forward to it.
Divers were each going equipped in their own way according to their interests. I was as always, going in armed with my camera but various tools were in evidence in the quest to find ‘spidge’.
For the unenlightened ‘spidge’ is a euphemism for things that are found whilst diving and can range from anything such as a coin found in the sand to a porthole from a wreck. Whilst bringing up artefacts from wrecks is a contentious issue in some quarters it is amusing to hear the cries of delight over the most mundane of objects that are bought up. I have to confess I am not immune from this excitement myself and I too have marvelled over what could be considered by some as very ordinary items as they are pulled wet and dripping and often unrecognisable from goody bags. It’s a bit like those sand boxes or bran bins you get at church fetes or school fairs where you rummage around until you hand feels something and you triumphantly pull it out. However, like the bran tubs it’s often the excitement of the quest rather than the quality of the find itself that generates the thrill. The quest on this particular occasion was to find two remaining shells from a box of four. The other two had previously been found.
An uneventful trip out and then we descended down the shot line to the boilers. From here the spidge hunters went off. I stayed around this area, as I knew from a previous dive that there was lot of small macro life I wanted to photograph. As it happened I must have inadvertently pressed the wrong button as I ended up with many of my pics just a black rectangle. I do remember something flashing up on the screen at some point, which was probably telling me something important, but as I can’t read what is on the screen underwater it’s not a lot of help! Throughout this time I could hear the steady banging of the spidge hunters as they tried to get the wreckage to give up her ‘treasure’. Back on the boat some of the treasure hunters had succeeded in their quest and despite my problem with the camera I had also had some measure of success and got a good shot of a candy stripe worm. So a good dive all round with most of us having mementos of the dive in some form or another.
