Diving holiday
Jun. 12th, 2010 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaIt takes six and a half hours to drive between Brighton and Little Haven, the small village right in the pig's snout of Wales that we were staying in, or at least it took us that long both of the times we've tried it. West of Haverfordwest and Milford Haven, there's nothing but little villages and narrow country roads between them, with distressingly frequent skid marks leading into the corners. The diving was split between Dale on the south coast when there were north winds, and Martin's Haven on the north coast when there was southerlies; Dale involved short walks from the car park, a proper pontoon, a pub, and a cafe that didn't mind having wet people in it, and Martin's Haven involved a car park at the top of a steep path, leading down to a bare shingly beach with not a lot else there apart from a ferry to Skomer for bird-watchers. Some of the club tried to revolt when presented with the prospect of hauling kit down there, but once enough people had laughed at them, carried the kit down regardless and then had brilliant dives, people decided they might play anyway.
This holiday was with the Brighton club, and I can't help but compare with the London club's holidays. This one was less ambitious. It was less led, more democratic in the arguing about stuff sense, but then again, more gregarious, with a feeling of most of us not quite knowing what we were doing but doing okay anyway. The London club would not have got into a situation where there was a diver with a problem on the first day and actually only one of the O2 kits was out on the boats (the wrong one, of course), would not have sheared the bottom off the engine on one of the boats half-way through the week, and would not have had a member who was down to organise a day's diving later in the week leave on account of only one boat meaning that the remaining diving would be less adventurous. Then again, a trip with the London club would have cost more, with less in the way of self-catering in the caravans and more expensive diving charges - a little more urbane, but a little less fun. No-one in the London club would have brought fifty-year old Tilley lamps for the barbecue, and at the same time, neither would anyone have decanted some of the paraffin into a lager can and done a fire-breathing show.
So the diving. There were a few absolutely brilliant dives, mainly out of Martin's Haven, which is why the steepness was worth it. There was the Lucy, a nearly-intact tubby thing covered in nudibranchs in 30-odd metres, and scenic diving on the north coast of Skomer Island. There were still some good ones out of Dale, principally wrecks of various degrees of broken-ness, of which the best was the Adamantios J Pithis (more commonly known as The Greek), a mess of random wreckage with no height apart from the giant boilers, but wherever you looked there was something mechanical-looking covered in enough layers of life to be only discernable from the surrounding rocks by shape. Apart from that the dives were not far off the sort of dives that could be done in Brighton only with more of them in a row; we did quite a lot of training stuff, which makes some sense when the holiday is the only time some members will be doing enough dives in a row to not be mainly remembering how to use their kit. I even got some dive leader training in, where me and another trainee had to tow each other around, carry each other up the beach and pretend to do CPR on each other. That was mainly quite ridiculous, and I'm hoping there'll be pictures somewhere I can see sometime soon.
There was quite a lot of rain. There was also at least a bit of sun. My hands have now got their regulation dirty-looking summer tan, while other parts of me are still milk-white since it was mostly too cool to wear anything without full sleeves. Chris has got a serious case of diver's tan, with a neat line dividing line between freckled brown and milk-white in the middle of his neck. My regs, which I serviced in a bit of a hurry just before the holiday, work, which is always a relief, and Chris has got a hole in his drysuit leg which was successfully patched with gaffer tape for the last dive. All in all, it was a good holiday.
This holiday was with the Brighton club, and I can't help but compare with the London club's holidays. This one was less ambitious. It was less led, more democratic in the arguing about stuff sense, but then again, more gregarious, with a feeling of most of us not quite knowing what we were doing but doing okay anyway. The London club would not have got into a situation where there was a diver with a problem on the first day and actually only one of the O2 kits was out on the boats (the wrong one, of course), would not have sheared the bottom off the engine on one of the boats half-way through the week, and would not have had a member who was down to organise a day's diving later in the week leave on account of only one boat meaning that the remaining diving would be less adventurous. Then again, a trip with the London club would have cost more, with less in the way of self-catering in the caravans and more expensive diving charges - a little more urbane, but a little less fun. No-one in the London club would have brought fifty-year old Tilley lamps for the barbecue, and at the same time, neither would anyone have decanted some of the paraffin into a lager can and done a fire-breathing show.
So the diving. There were a few absolutely brilliant dives, mainly out of Martin's Haven, which is why the steepness was worth it. There was the Lucy, a nearly-intact tubby thing covered in nudibranchs in 30-odd metres, and scenic diving on the north coast of Skomer Island. There were still some good ones out of Dale, principally wrecks of various degrees of broken-ness, of which the best was the Adamantios J Pithis (more commonly known as The Greek), a mess of random wreckage with no height apart from the giant boilers, but wherever you looked there was something mechanical-looking covered in enough layers of life to be only discernable from the surrounding rocks by shape. Apart from that the dives were not far off the sort of dives that could be done in Brighton only with more of them in a row; we did quite a lot of training stuff, which makes some sense when the holiday is the only time some members will be doing enough dives in a row to not be mainly remembering how to use their kit. I even got some dive leader training in, where me and another trainee had to tow each other around, carry each other up the beach and pretend to do CPR on each other. That was mainly quite ridiculous, and I'm hoping there'll be pictures somewhere I can see sometime soon.
There was quite a lot of rain. There was also at least a bit of sun. My hands have now got their regulation dirty-looking summer tan, while other parts of me are still milk-white since it was mostly too cool to wear anything without full sleeves. Chris has got a serious case of diver's tan, with a neat line dividing line between freckled brown and milk-white in the middle of his neck. My regs, which I serviced in a bit of a hurry just before the holiday, work, which is always a relief, and Chris has got a hole in his drysuit leg which was successfully patched with gaffer tape for the last dive. All in all, it was a good holiday.