[Freeflow]

A lazy Friday off work means a day at Stoney with Geoff and the Dolphin. Geoff’s Ray was out for a spin too, and now that he is using on oxygauge and a gas calculating spreadsheet he is tuning his mixes as I do. I ran a 40% through the 60% jet, and Geoff was running the same through his 50% jet. I had made a couple of mods to my kit for this dive, slinging the 7L to my left with a Scubapro reg, and moving the console for the bailout to the right hand side. I also bought a knife with a hose clip on it from the shiny new shop at Stoney, and as it’s made from titanium [although I didn’t know that when I bought it] I feel like a true rufty-tufty techie now. Geoff had brought Chris, his wife along to take the mickey out of me mercilessly, and Joanne his daughter to get me to marry her, more of which later.

The plan for dive one was to head over to the Cessna ledge and then around the perimeter at 20m Geoff’s tea was suitably spiked with a mild tranquilliser to stop him from fining off at 5 knots. While Geoff was doing his final kit checks I amused Chris and Joanne with a simple card trick. I also amused myself by forgetting to turn on the oxygauge before I hit the water. Although it wasn’t a serious error, and I was able to turn it on at 4m, it was somewhat complacent of me to miss such a simple thing. We wandered down the road to the pit and bottomed at 32.3 m where we wandered around the wall and onto the Cessna ledge. I haven’t been much past the plane before, usually turning right to the barge and van before heading home. I was having one of my over active imagination moments as we worked our way into the corner past the aircraft. The bottom had a circle of large-ish rocks around a darker patch, which I thought looked like the remains of a camp fire at 20m. Quite close by there was a similar formation. Geoff was swimming slowly so we could admire the view, and I was going to fill the tyre I found with air and send it up when I noticed about a dozen crayfish in it. I showed Geoff, who seemed impressed, although his admiration of my all round diving skills came to an abrupt end when I played ‘human pinball’ off just about every part of the wooden barge as I swam through it. We began an ascent to 12m at this point, swimming over the top of the transit and keeping the wall to our right we swam around the perimiter of the cove. We found a couple of 2½ foot pike to stare at, and in Geoff’s case dazzle with a torch, and a jack pike trying to get some p&q over the far side, which it was until we arrived. I was getting a bit hacked off with the hose that feeds the wing throughout the dive. It was pressing on the back of my head in the most annoying way. At 60 min into the dive we went to 5m to do a travelling stop and passed the winch block. At this point I also shut off my gas and went on to the stage. I must admit I don’t like the hose routing or mouthpiece on the Scubapro, both will have to be changed at some point. The first stage lacks the turret found on the DST4 first stage so I may put an Apeks first stage on the Scubapro second to see what happens. The other option is to use an Egress so that I am Apeks all round, but I shall have to dive one first. The position the tank sat in was also annoying, and I think I will have to reposition the ‘D’ rings to stop the bottom of the 7 hitting my left thigh, a problem I have with my 10 sidemount. One thing that did work well was using the knife on the end of the oxygauge hose as it stopped the floaty gauge a treat [pics of this are on my Dolphin site, under modifications]. I blobbed up at 70 min, the official duration of the scrubber in the Ray, and we were about half way between the pub and the galleon wreck.

Sausage [for me] and bacon [for Geoff] sarnies were called for as usual on the surface break. Chris seems to think I am the best thing since sliced bread when it comes to suitors for Joanne. I think that her judgement took the day off when she made that decision, although the offer is tempting, as I would be six camels better off. I’m not sure Joanne is too happy with the idea of her mum trying to marry her off though. Chris’ mum was there as well, but I didn’t get much help from her when Chris was picking on me.

I had a quick relax in the boot my car while Geoff repacked his scrubber. I rerouted the hose from my bailout tank [pictures on my Dolphin site] and then it was time for round two. As Geoff was running the 50% jet, and I had not used the Dolph tank during the last ten minutes of the first dive I still had 100 bar left, and Geoff had 70. The nominal figures for the flow rates are 5.8 l/min for the 60% jet, 7.3 l/min for the 50% jet, 10.4 l/min for the 40% jet, and 15.6 l/min for the 32% jet. The short version is that I would be running at just under 80% of Geoff’s consumption of gas. When I test my jet flow as part of the set up procedure I have noticed that it is at the lower end of the allowable flow rates, so that may also be a contributory factor. In we jumped, remembering to turn the pO2 monitor on. We went from the bus stop to the cockpit, over the edge to the Stanegarth, which we reached by pulling along the anchor chain, a bit easier and quicker than fining out. From there Geoff led us East because my compass sticks and I was feeling lazy anyway. I need to have a look at replacing the compass module soon. Geoff was stirring up the silt at this point with his front slung 3L bailout, and I think he might have gone to the same dive classes as Lee from the Drager dive-in at Capernwray to the 6m ledge from where we could complete our swim around. We finished back at the bus stop, where I asked Geoff how much gas he had to which he replied with the clenched fist of 50 bar, so we had a quick tour around the APC that was dropped in this year. When we got back to the ladder Geoff had switched to open circuit as his Ray cylinder was empty. I asked why he had indicated that he had 50 bar left, and he laughed it off. “Well, I did have more than 50 bar in my bailout”, he replied. This is the man that told ME off for getting him down to 20 bar the last time we went diving.

On the surface I was chatting to the other two old lags that usually dive with Geoff on a Friday and one of those had come out with 10 bar on open circuit gear. Perhaps it’s the Kamikaze branch of BSAC this lot belong to. In the pub Chris was complaining that I was a slow worker and that Joanne and I weren’t even engaged yet. I don’t know if she was expecting us to run into the toilets for a quickie, but she was offering the use of her mums wedding dress. I made sure that all plans were put on hold by drinking a cocktail of grapefruit juice and coke, which tastes a lot better than it looks, which is fortunate. Chris lulled me into a false sense of security by not extracting the Michael too much, until she told me my nickname would be ‘Twinkle’. Nice.

Dive 1

32.3m
1h 10 min

Depth 23.1 30.6 25.4 22.4 19.0 13.0 avge
pO2 1.00 1.31 10.4 0.99 0.91 0.73 --
vO2 0.81 0.66 0.87 0.79 0.73 0.70 0.76
Loop% 30.2 32.3 29.4 30.6 31.4 31.7 30.9

SI 1 h 57 min

Dive 2

21.6m
34 min

Depth 19.9 20.0 19.9 15.5 5.1 avge
pO2 0.89 0.89 0.84 0.75 0.53 --
vO2 0.85 0.85 0.96 0.87 0.44 0.79
Loop% 29.8 29.7 28.1 29.4 35.1 30.4