I dived yesterday with Miss Captain and 4 others on The Wet Wrecks boat 'Zeus" out of Southwold, Suffolk.
Miss C. is a newcomer to UK sea diving and have a number of 20/20 dives under her belt. She likes diving - and with me to boot, so I have been going with her to get her acclimatised in the UK for a while now. Part of the small dives we have been doing is to just build her confidence and show her that she is a 1000 times better than she thinks she is. NO small task
Dive 1: The wreck of the HMS Waveflower (armed trawler - s. in WW2 - loads and loads of spidge, and a nice wreck). It was a terrible dive and a great dive.
Terrible - wreck was 25-30m and the viz was maybe 10cm
Very Very dark. Deep. Plankton everywhere and Miss C. openly stated that she had a panic attack. Total terror + her first real experience of Narcosis - so much so that she was screaming to get out of the water (in her head, not vocally). I have to say I was very proud of her as I knew this was a big deal for her. It took ages to get to 29m as well due to a long long time for her ears to clear.
Great - Miss C. displayed this panic with a small flash of the torch and a little thumbs up - "Let's go please". Only the massive saucer eyes belayed fear so we tootled back up. Out of the water and fear over but she was awesome - no panic getting the better of her on a first real deep dark UK dive.
Dive 2: The wreck of an unknown ship with a bronze prop. Same viz, same depth, same dark.
Miss C. and I had discussed dive 1 and this was going to be a challenge for her as she knew what was coming. Once we got to the bottom of the shot we found that we had missed the wreck and anchored into some random pile of rope laying on the bottom. Never mind - we couldn't see fook all anyway. Mary and I stayed at the bottom for a few minutes just beating her demons and she persevered like a trooper. Although still scared she was calm and collected and felt a lot better.
Not a great day's diving for seeing sutuff, but a great day's diving for learning. Always a good result.
After tea and medals we went home - Egypt on Friday!!!
