Oostvoornsemeer (Holland)

[troc]

This Sunday the Randstad Harings BSAC club (also known as the ones who ignore people called Andy) took some trainees to the Stormvogel end of the Oostvoornsemeer near Rotterdam in Holland.

This is a brackish lake, just south of Rotterdam harbour, about 3cm (or maybe a little bit more than that) inland from the sea. The lake is an extrememly popular spot for training divers and gets quite crowded on weekends - not quite as bad as stoney though In the middle it can get quite deep but most diving takes place with a maximum around 25m or so.

There is a shelving beach entry or a long jetty for giant stride (or ungainly flop) entry with well-designed exit ladders. Underwater there are some tyre-trails that lead you to some of the intersting things down there, including an old beetle (car, not six-legged wassname), a couple of boats, a caravan (well this is holland) etc. Some of these are also marked with buoys and there are a couple of platforms as well. The unique feature here is a swimming pool slide, one of the tubular ones that you find in big entertainment complexes. This has an entry at 10m and an exit at 6m and is an effective way of doing a safety stop whilst being quite good fun. The thing is one way only, for obvioud reasons and there are large holes cut in it every few metres to allow people to escape! Bloody good fun.

There is a dive shop on site which can do Nitrox fills (quite expensive though) and rents gear for when you realise you've forgotten something. They also provide warm showers! Next door is a decent cafe and there's also usually a chip van around serving the usual selection of deep fried Dutch snacks.

As to this Sunday's dive(s), not brilliant as there had been a strong wind for the past few days and vis was bad (add in a few hundred fins and it gets much worse), around 2m although ti depth the silt hadn't been thrown up and it was much better (but cold - 10 degrees below 17m). Temperature was 15 degrees in the shallows so the trainees were happy. Cue lots of happy splashing around and mask clearing from those doing their first OW dives and lots of bloody hard work from those of us practicing rescue techniques.

Overall we all had fun, everything was well organised (a schoolteacher in charge....) and the bad weather held off until after the last divers were back in the cafe!

To sum up, this is an excellent place to train or practice but there's really naff all to see down there, the vis always sucks (except in winter when it reaches over 10m but then the water is around 2 degrees or less) and the Dutch really do have more silt then they know what to do with. Excellent chips though. With mayonaise. Yum.

Troc.