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Aug. 28th, 2008 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaChris is away again tonight, can you tell?
One of the subtitles in my 101 Things list is I Miss The Sea. This weekend, I did not, in any sense, miss the sea. The first time I went to Plymouth was for the Student Sailing Nationals back in November 1995; the weather was atrocious and I hadn't been sailing long and I was wearing slippery crappy waterproofs over a wetsuit and I managed to slip right out of the Lark and into Plymouth Sound. My abiding memory of Plymouth Sound ever since is that it tastes bloody awful. I've been to Plymouth a few times since, usually involving Tom, including a couple of times when James was a Marine Warden round at Wembury and we went rockpool scouting for him to find starfish and velvet swimmer crabs to show to kids.
This weekend was the Clidive bank holiday trip, which consisted of nearly thirty people of varying diving ability, two RIBs, two B&B pubs in the village of Turnchapel at the north-east end of the Sound, a certain amount of rain, a moderate amount of beer and quite a lot of falling in the water on purpose. Me and Chris took the day off on Friday so as to be able to meander down and stop at anything that took our fancy, which included Stonehenge and Woodhenge. Saturday was the first day of diving, and we were supposed to be in the second wave of boats that left at 11.30am, leaving plenty of time for breakfast and preparations, only Ben rang us at 7am to ask if I could be ready in time for the 8.30 boat. I did more or less manage it, but my ears let me down and I couldn't get below about five metres. Lunchtime was rather dismal, since Chris was off in the 11.30 boats and everyone else had gone somewhere I couldn't find while I was changing my wetsuit for one that fitted better. Well, differently, since the second was too large on the arms but at least wasn't corset-tight. Tighter is generally better than looser in wetsuits, but not when it's making you feel even queasier than a stationary rolling boat already does. I tried again in the afternoon, on a dive in 14m where where everyone else came back up exclaiming about the conger eels, but my ears still weren’t playing, which was a bit disappointing.
Sunday saw us arranged in different waves again, so I got up considerably earlier than I get up on a typical weekday to go and put on a cold, damp wetsuit and sit in a open boat in Cawsand Bay. This time, very slowly and with much exasperation and clearing, I managed to make it to ten metres, and then suddenly realised that there was rock and kelp and sand right under me and there I was. Having got there, the actual diving bit is quite straightforward, and I got pointed at lots of interesting stuff like anenomes with crabs in and cotton-spinners (which look like big black cucumbers with tiny legs) and lots of sand gobies scuttling along the bottom and starfish everywhere. I was very pleased when I came up, though, at finally having got an actual dive in. And getting my ears to work once seemed to crack it for the whole weekend, because they were no trouble at all for the rest of it. In the afternoon we went to a wreck round Rame Head, Scylla, a frigate that was sunk on purpose in 2004 to make an artificial reef. It's getting properly into its reef-like stride by now and there were vast numbers of fish hanging round it; we swam along one of the outer walkways and into the helicopter bay and it was eerie but interesting to see it like that. There was a good old swell, though, and when I was back on the RIB, the expanding gas that comes out of your guts as a belch when you get back to the surface decided to take everything else in my stomach with it. Still, I didn't miss the sea...
We managed to arrange it so that neither of us were in the first wave on Monday morning, which meant only getting up at about the same time as I normally do on a weekday to go and put on a cold, damp wetsuit. Mind you, I don't normally get fed my choice of fried breakfast when I get up so it was still an improvement. The weather was pretty rubbish outside the breakwater so that morning we stayed inside it, diving in pleasantly non-nauseating flat water around the breakwater fort. I went right round it, although rather quickly for the last quarter of it on account of being cold. If I'm going to keep doing this diving malarkey in the UK, which I'm not yet certain about although in the sense of needing to try that some more first rather than being really dubious about it, I'm going to have to get a drysuit, and that means custom-made, although absolutely any cold-water protection that's going to work properly is going to have to be custom-made for me anyway.
After lunch, everyone else wanted to get on with packing up and getting away, and me and Chris were the only people left up for a final dive; Ben was perfectly happy to take us out, though, so we went to the breakwater itself and trundled along the edge of it, looking at kelp and rocks and more sand gobies and some vast spiny starfish and some fairly huge prawns. Chris reckons that's the least interesting dive he's ever done, and it's true that there wasn't an awful lot to see, but for me I'm still quite entertained by being underwater, looking at underwater things going round doing their underwater doings, no matter if it's only a few sand gobies and starfish and prawns. Also, while the Scylla was good it was a bit dramatic, what with the swell and the hurling and my weight-belt nearly coming off (a fairly hairy thing to happen at 17m, it means you go rocketing up to the surface, and stand a good chance of getting the bends and outwards-burst eardrums) and the memorial plate on the taffrail to two divers who'd recently copped it, so it was nice to do a very ordinary dive, to get a sense of what a dive is like apart from all the stuff. It's that rather than the drama which will decide whether I keep doing it, I think.
So what with three notional dives in appalling visibility in Wraysbury the weekend before, that's now seven dives I've officially done. The woman who was my buddy on the Scylla dive has done about a hundred times that number. That's an awful lot of dives, and she's certainly not the most experienced diver in the club. Now, if only anything would work out with bands at the minute, I might start keeping a tally of dives versus gigs and see which goes up faster...
One of the subtitles in my 101 Things list is I Miss The Sea. This weekend, I did not, in any sense, miss the sea. The first time I went to Plymouth was for the Student Sailing Nationals back in November 1995; the weather was atrocious and I hadn't been sailing long and I was wearing slippery crappy waterproofs over a wetsuit and I managed to slip right out of the Lark and into Plymouth Sound. My abiding memory of Plymouth Sound ever since is that it tastes bloody awful. I've been to Plymouth a few times since, usually involving Tom, including a couple of times when James was a Marine Warden round at Wembury and we went rockpool scouting for him to find starfish and velvet swimmer crabs to show to kids.
This weekend was the Clidive bank holiday trip, which consisted of nearly thirty people of varying diving ability, two RIBs, two B&B pubs in the village of Turnchapel at the north-east end of the Sound, a certain amount of rain, a moderate amount of beer and quite a lot of falling in the water on purpose. Me and Chris took the day off on Friday so as to be able to meander down and stop at anything that took our fancy, which included Stonehenge and Woodhenge. Saturday was the first day of diving, and we were supposed to be in the second wave of boats that left at 11.30am, leaving plenty of time for breakfast and preparations, only Ben rang us at 7am to ask if I could be ready in time for the 8.30 boat. I did more or less manage it, but my ears let me down and I couldn't get below about five metres. Lunchtime was rather dismal, since Chris was off in the 11.30 boats and everyone else had gone somewhere I couldn't find while I was changing my wetsuit for one that fitted better. Well, differently, since the second was too large on the arms but at least wasn't corset-tight. Tighter is generally better than looser in wetsuits, but not when it's making you feel even queasier than a stationary rolling boat already does. I tried again in the afternoon, on a dive in 14m where where everyone else came back up exclaiming about the conger eels, but my ears still weren’t playing, which was a bit disappointing.
Sunday saw us arranged in different waves again, so I got up considerably earlier than I get up on a typical weekday to go and put on a cold, damp wetsuit and sit in a open boat in Cawsand Bay. This time, very slowly and with much exasperation and clearing, I managed to make it to ten metres, and then suddenly realised that there was rock and kelp and sand right under me and there I was. Having got there, the actual diving bit is quite straightforward, and I got pointed at lots of interesting stuff like anenomes with crabs in and cotton-spinners (which look like big black cucumbers with tiny legs) and lots of sand gobies scuttling along the bottom and starfish everywhere. I was very pleased when I came up, though, at finally having got an actual dive in. And getting my ears to work once seemed to crack it for the whole weekend, because they were no trouble at all for the rest of it. In the afternoon we went to a wreck round Rame Head, Scylla, a frigate that was sunk on purpose in 2004 to make an artificial reef. It's getting properly into its reef-like stride by now and there were vast numbers of fish hanging round it; we swam along one of the outer walkways and into the helicopter bay and it was eerie but interesting to see it like that. There was a good old swell, though, and when I was back on the RIB, the expanding gas that comes out of your guts as a belch when you get back to the surface decided to take everything else in my stomach with it. Still, I didn't miss the sea...
We managed to arrange it so that neither of us were in the first wave on Monday morning, which meant only getting up at about the same time as I normally do on a weekday to go and put on a cold, damp wetsuit. Mind you, I don't normally get fed my choice of fried breakfast when I get up so it was still an improvement. The weather was pretty rubbish outside the breakwater so that morning we stayed inside it, diving in pleasantly non-nauseating flat water around the breakwater fort. I went right round it, although rather quickly for the last quarter of it on account of being cold. If I'm going to keep doing this diving malarkey in the UK, which I'm not yet certain about although in the sense of needing to try that some more first rather than being really dubious about it, I'm going to have to get a drysuit, and that means custom-made, although absolutely any cold-water protection that's going to work properly is going to have to be custom-made for me anyway.
After lunch, everyone else wanted to get on with packing up and getting away, and me and Chris were the only people left up for a final dive; Ben was perfectly happy to take us out, though, so we went to the breakwater itself and trundled along the edge of it, looking at kelp and rocks and more sand gobies and some vast spiny starfish and some fairly huge prawns. Chris reckons that's the least interesting dive he's ever done, and it's true that there wasn't an awful lot to see, but for me I'm still quite entertained by being underwater, looking at underwater things going round doing their underwater doings, no matter if it's only a few sand gobies and starfish and prawns. Also, while the Scylla was good it was a bit dramatic, what with the swell and the hurling and my weight-belt nearly coming off (a fairly hairy thing to happen at 17m, it means you go rocketing up to the surface, and stand a good chance of getting the bends and outwards-burst eardrums) and the memorial plate on the taffrail to two divers who'd recently copped it, so it was nice to do a very ordinary dive, to get a sense of what a dive is like apart from all the stuff. It's that rather than the drama which will decide whether I keep doing it, I think.
So what with three notional dives in appalling visibility in Wraysbury the weekend before, that's now seven dives I've officially done. The woman who was my buddy on the Scylla dive has done about a hundred times that number. That's an awful lot of dives, and she's certainly not the most experienced diver in the club. Now, if only anything would work out with bands at the minute, I might start keeping a tally of dives versus gigs and see which goes up faster...