jane

A quiet month with nothing much happening and no diving till next spring as its too cold for me. Really trying to make the most of the time to tweak photos get them all copied onto CDs etc.

Due to a recent run in with Photobucket and their change in terms and conditions I am now changing to another hosting site ‘My Photo Album’. This will involve a fair bit of messing around and loading hundreds of photos onto the site, but ultimately will be better as the albums can have different templates/colours etc etc, and generally more choice and flexibility in displaying them than photobucket. It also means I can annotate all my photos from Australia so I’ll be reliving the trip as I go through them.
Here are a couple…..a very familiar landmark in Australia and one that most people recognise.

It looks a bit different from the air!

That was my first (and probably last) flight in a little plane! I was absolutely scared stiff and much prefer helicoptors.

The month started off with a couple of Sundays spent diving down in Weymouth on the brand new diving boat Scimitar. The first was another Yorkshire Divers gig , the second was just a last minute decision. As the weather looked good I was just trying to get in another days diving as its getting a bit cold for me now. Whilst sea temps are ok, its getting warmed up between dives that’s a problem. Many of the boats are now in for the winter with only a handful operating over the winter months, so I think it was probably my last sea dive this year. However, having done over 90 dives all over the UK this year it has been a good one.

Also had a very interesting visit to the Thames Valley Police Search and Recovery Unit near Reading and a couple more articles went on the Travel Dive site. A spectacular drift dive in Skye and a second article about things that can be visited during surface intervals etc that tell ‘The Story of Scapa’. It was really inspired by Bob Anderson skipper of MV Halton. Like many of the skippers up there he is passionate about Scapa and its history, and sees it as ‘more than just a diving venue’

At least it wasn’t icy weather for camping this time and I had remembered not only my thermarest, but also a duvet in addition to my knackered out sleeping bag. I was down in Weymouth again for another days diving off Scimitar. It was interesting to see the town’s harbour bridge opening up to let the yachts out. Despite visits here over the years for a variety of reasons, it was something I had never seen.

With only three of us on board we had loads of room to spread out and the plan was a Dutch steamship SS Binnendyk and then a shallower second dive. In 1939 the Binnendyk was en route for Rotterdam when she was asked to pull in at Portland by the Royal Navy to be searched for contraband; on her way she struck a German mine. She now lies at around 28m and is a nice easy dive if you get the timing right and catch slack. Unfortunately we were a little too keen and the current was still running. Finally arriving at the bottom I could see the viz was pretty grim at around 4-3m. I decided to stay in the relative shelter of the boilers and poke around there for a while in the hope that the current would ease off a bit. In the meantime I spotted something bright orange a couple of yards away. Thinking it may be something exciting I was disappointed when I realised it was just the dsmb from one of the other divers. I managed to collect the line that was reeling out and following the trail round the boiler found the diver, and waved it at him while hanging on to a bit of wreckage. Retreating once more to the comparative shelter behind the boiler and looking round I spotted a largish fish…………a triggerfish?….. I did a double take. I had seen loads of these last year whilst diving in Australia, so automatically labelled it in my mind before thinking, hang on, this is UK pea soup, what’s it doing here? I’d never noticed the picture of the triggerfish on the front of the ‘Dive Dorset’ book otherwise I wouldn’t have been so surprised. I took a couple of pictures but with the poor viz and being unable to stay still in the current none of them were much good. It also did its usual fish thing turning tail and quickly disappeared into the soupy green gloom. (the original does look a little better than the copy here)

For some years various sighting have been made all round the uk coast of these grey triggerfish (Balistes capriscus) and in some cases large regular groupings are seen annually such as on the wreck of the Royal Adelaide which is right round the other side of Portland Bill. Why they are here is a bit of a mystery. Their normal range is in the tropical Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But they are not good swimmers and it is thought that they may be bought in by the Gulf Stream from mid Atlantic islands such as the Azores rather than battling the currents and travelling up from the Med. It is usually the late summer months when the seas are at their warmest here that they can be found in the waters around the UK. Unfortunately they cannot survive our winters and it is more than likely they die off when temperatures drop below 12C. However, fishers in Weymouth have caught immature triggers no bigger than 10cm and it is thought possible that they may be breeding locally.

With the weather beginning to pick up we did the Spaniard in Portland Harbour as a second dive. Again the viz was pretty abismal but not having dived it before I found it vaguely interesting. The seabed around the bottom of the wreck was covered with holes. These varied in size from a centimetre or two to about six. I kept noticing movement and looking closer I could just about make out the sand gobies that were lurking all over the silty seabed often sitting next to their hole. They are so well camouflaged it is only when they move you can see them. They would then disappear like lightening as soon as you got anywhere near to try and take a pic.

Although a pretty poor day in terms of visibility, having seen a triggerfish I was absolutely delighted as it made the trip worthwhile.

When they started pulling young men from the river with their flies open the speculation began. Was this a new cult, trend, fantasy, ritual? All these ideas were put forward as possible explanations. The simple answer was, (as so often is the case), the obvious one. These young men were caught short whilst walking home after a night of much jollification and revelry.Then while standing on the riverbank to answer the call of nature they simply lost their balance and tumbled into the water. Overcome by the cold and in their intoxicated state they were unable to save themselves and drowned. Sadly this is one of the common incidents that the police search and recovery team have to deal with.

I was on a visit that my club had organised to the Thames Valley Police Search and Recovery Tactical Unit near Reading. Sergeant Jill Williams gave us a fascinating talk about the work of the team and I was amazed by the variety and extent of the work they actually undertake. Like many people I assumed their remit was mainly for searching and finding people in lakes, rivers etc. but they also search and recover things such as weapons or stolen goods and other things that have been part of criminal activities. Amazingly even fingerprints can still be intact and taken off some objects if they haven’t moved around too much in the water. Throwing things off bridges is a favourite place for disposing of a variety of bits and pieces for many people and therefore diving beneath bridges can reap great rewards apparently!

What did surprise me however was the amount of land-based work they do. For example at present they are helping scour the woods near High Wycombe looking for evidence associated with the recent terrorist incidents. (At least this explains the police presence I have seen recently as I drive past this area). They may also be called in to recover people who have died at home. This is in those cases where the bodies have remained undiscovered for some time. These may be in an advanced state of decomposition (especially if central heating has been on!) and no other agency will want to be involved with moving them. On one occasion a death was only discovered when maggots began to fall through the ceiling from the flat above! Many of these bodies have reached melt down with body fluids oozing out everywhere and even parts of the body beginning to become detached when they are moved. A team will go in fully kitted up to remove them.

Many search and recovery teams have been disbanded in police cutbacks and the Thames Valley branch are one of about sixteen left in the country, so they have a massive area that they service. The unit consists of eight divers who are on call 24/7 unless they are on leave or sick, so with around 400 jobs a year they are extremely busy. The normal size team for attending an incident will consist of a diver and an attendant to sort equipment and feed air for that diver, then there will be a second safety diver and also his attendant; the fifth member will be a supervisor. Despite being scattered across a wide geographical area the team will gather within hours to attend an incident even though it is not a matter of life and death, as in the case of a suicide. This haste is for the benefit of those left behind and the need to find answers and start the process of coming to terms with a death. Despite the fact that so much of their work deals with the dead, I was particularly struck with the amount of compassion and empathy for the living relatives, that seemed to be an important part of how they viewed the speed at which a job should be carried out.

Training to be a police diver is rigorous. Rarely do vacancies become available and several years experience within the force preceding this is expected before consideration. Applicants do not necessarily have to be able to dive already, as even qualified divers will be retrained. Before the dive training you will undergo a gruelling week consisting not only of medicals and fitness tests but activities that will assess your reactions to working with ropes and heights, going underground in small spaces, diving or being submerged and being asked to do tasks with blacked out masks.

It certainly was a fascinating visit and well worth going.

An hour and half from home and I suddenly realised I hadn’t put my thermarest in the car………..bugger! Too late to turn back, this meant a rather uncomfortable night on the ground. I was camping overnight in Weymouth in order to meet the others at 7.30 with ropes off at 8 the following morning.

What concerned me most, given the time of the year, was the cold. A thermarest whilst being the most comfortable sleeping mat on the market with its honeycomb design inside, is also a fantastic insulator against the cold that comes up through the ground. Having spent more nights in my tent last year than my bed, my sleeping bag was a little knackered to say the least and not up to much these days, certainly not the frost that I was expecting given the forecast, so I had been relying on the thermarest to stop the cold coming up. Finally I decided to chuck all my diving gear out of the car and sleep in there. Despite having an estate car it’s only a small one, so I have to sleep on an angle if I want to stretch out. It is one of the few times I am glad I am so short! Laying my tent out in the back of the car for a bit of extra insulation to sleep on rather an in I at least managed to get some sleep before it got very cold round about four in the morning. The ice on the car windows had melted by six and that was when I was planning to get up anyway.

Meeting the others down by the harbour it was nice and quiet being a Sunday morning and we were soon loaded up and away. In the meantime the sun had come out and it promised to be a lovely day as we made our way across a very flat sea to the first dive site the St Dunstan. Having done this wreck a couple of weeks earlier I was interested to do it again as I felt I knew my way round it a bit. It turned out to be a fantastic dive because of the viz which was around 10-12m. I saw so much more than I had the time before and even rescued a crab that had got caught in some fishing line. The only down about the whole dive was that I messed up my camera settings. I thought I had set it up to take some more pics in Raw but realised at the end of the dive that all I had taken were Jpegs. The camera had defaulted back to the Jpeg setting. Not being used to taking Raw pics I hadn’t even caught on to the fact that it wasn’t taking long to save them onto the card. I was gutted. With such good visibility it had been absolutely ideal for taking some really good pictures. So although the pics seem reasonable I know they probably could have been even better taken in RAW with some tweaking in Photoshop.

The second dive was the James Fennel, which was on our way back towards Weymouth and near the shoreline. This was a steam trawler, which was very broken up; the boiler being the only part that I recognised. Having pootled around the wreckage a bit and taken some pics (this time making sure it was set to Raw!) I then decided to go and have a look around further away from the wreckage. This seemed a little more fruitful in terms of marine life and I found tompots and velvet swimming crabs and some lovely big snakelock anemones. There were also lots of sponges and sea squirts scattered around on the huge rocks. So a nice little dive especially if you think of it as a scenic rather than a wreck dive.

A good month with a return to Scotland…yet again! This time for a weekend in one of my favourite places to dive The Sound of Mull in the NW with Lochaline Charter Boats. Later on in the month another weekend YD gig this time gathering at Lyme Regis on the south coast and diving off Blue Turtle. This is an area I had never dived before so new dive sites, and a place with a lot of history.

This month also saw the return of the magazine format for Travel Dives front page which I continue to write for.
Finally at the end of the month a dive at the famous Stoney Cove in order to start experimenting with some picture taking in RAW, this is the prop on Nautilus.

Initially I said no thank you…… puddle diving is not my thing…..despite everything being blown out at the weekend I really didn’t want to go to Stoney. However, after a little reflection I decided that perhaps there may be a good reason to go to Stoney. I had for some time been toying with the idea of shooting some pictures in RAW. I kept hearing that the results can be so much better, particularly with the sort of photographic conditions we have here with our temperate green water (aka pea soup at times), but had never got round to it.

Knowing that it would mean a lot of work i.e. downloading plugins etc and trying to familiarise myself with yet more new stuff on the computer I had been putting it off. I am an IT numpty and find computer stuff difficult and trying to do ‘new things’ very stressful particularly when it just doesn’t do what it’s meant to. However I thought this would be too good an opportunity to miss, as I wouldn’t be wasting a good sea dive taking pictures that might not come out because I hadn’t a clue what I was doing.

As it was a Monday morning and the others were driving from Cardiff we had a very civilised meeting time of ten o’clock. I would never go to Stoney at a weekend and I really cannot get my head round why people would leave home in the middle of the night so that they could start queuing by five or six o’clock just to dive a quarry. I have left for a dive in the middle of the night but that was the Thistlegorm…..a tad different!

Turned out to be a really nice day, weather was a bit gloomy but we had a great couple of dives doing the usual and visiting the Stangarth, Wessex helicopter, Nautilus, etc.

Although I need a lot more practise with the processing bit I was quite pleased with a few of the pics for a first try.