[MonkeyPony]

So Sunday morning dawns and my sunburn feels a lot worse.
The skipper and I collected the boat from the marina and once again headed to Castletown to pick up the other three (keeping at a steady 6 knots). This day started badly as I vaulted of the side of the rib to put the anchor on the shore and promptly slipped of the tube due to an excess of KY on my hands and went face first into the water, and I hadn’t quite got round to zipping my suit up…..

Fortunately I only suffered a wet arm and a lot of embarassment.
The plan for today was to do the Aeolian Sky but with the vis as bad as it was we decided there was not much point so set off do dive the sea caves at Lulworth.

As we headed out the fog rolled in and a decision was made that drifting the caves wasn’t going to be too clever either so we decided to do the Black Hawk bow instead.

We arrived on site just as another boat was pulling its divers out. The skipper informed us that he’d managed to jam his shot in the wreck so we said we’d free it and send it up when we got down.

Ben and I reached the bottom to find a well jammed shot and a very large wrasse, who was presumably not too happy have a dirty great weight in his house. I bagged up the shot and we set off on our bimble when what should we come across but a very familiar looking shot weight with no sign of the lift bag (apparently the strap had broken on the way up). Glad that neither one of us had caught it on the noggin on its way back down we pulled out a couple of spare smbs and sent it on its way again. Our task finally completed we set off again enjoying some nice scenery and some fairly good vis (5 meters ish).

The second dive was non-eventful apart from seeing a ray and the largest damn spider crab I’ve ever seen.

With the boat out of the water the skipper and I headed home in the van only to discover that the turbo seems to have stopped working so every time there was the slightest hint of a hill our speed dropped to 25mph. The 147 mile trip back to Aylesbury took nearly 5 hours!!

All in all an enjoyable weekend although the nice vis of Scapa in September seems a long way off..

Lessons learnt from the weekend:

1) Use more suntan lotion

2) The little DIR knife makes an excellent hot chocolate stirring device

3) Ben, for gods sake buy a decent torch

4) Remove excess ky before leaping off boats carrying anchors

5) Ensure dry suit is zipped before leaping off boats carrying anchors

6) The fundies course sounds like a lot of fun and is something I may consider next year