[Phoenix]

Today saw a planned dive to 60m for 40mins, due to the low pressure fills we get here I ended up with 85bar of O2 at the start of the dive after analyisis and calibration had been done. I new I'd need more O2 but not a problem, I had an offboard S30 that I could plug in.

The dive didn't go swimmingly well, mainly due to the crew dropping the shot in the wrong location leading to us enjoying a very dull sandy bottom playing hunt the rusty metal. Due to poor viz I stayed on the onboard O2 supply for the bottom time and decided I'd use the offboard during deco, all was well right up until I cracked the valve on the O2 bottle and the 2nd stage started freeflowing. Unfortunately this is a Sorasub unit and you can't remove the front plate underwater and no amount of "persuasion" was going to stop the f/flow.

I resorted to closing the valve and only opening it to add some gas then shutting it again, unfortunately I still lost too much gas and had to bail out onto EAN60 for the last 13 minutes of the dive.

All in all it was a useful experience but I wish I could afford a booster pump and get some of these 200+ bar O2 fills I keep hearing about.

Ian