27th to 29th May 2000
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UKRS#05 Cornwall 27th to 29th May 2000 |
A rain soaked Bank Holiday in Cornwall, organised by Jason.
UKRS on a rather damp beach, waiting for a boat...(From Jason Poynting : Group Report)
I foolishly decided to organise a UKRS dive down in Cornwall. Organising it proved to be a bit of a nightmare because I had trouble getting enough numbers and people kept dropping out. Eventually just seven of us turned up.
Our first dive was to be the Mohegan, and after an awful lot of hanging around on the beach, we finally got underway. I'd booked places on a RIB shuttle, but we actually got on the hardboat. Everyone seemed quite pleased about this. Some of them even stopped whinging for 10 mins. Entry into the water was by a back roll. After I'd rolled in, I wasn't too happy that when I bobbed back to the surface I hit my head on the boat. My buddy for the dive was Simon because he'd begged in the pub the night before. After about half an hour, he clenched his fists and waved them at me. I was somewhat puzzled because I couldn't believe that he'd actually meant he was down to 100 bar on his twinset, but he was. So we finished off the dive and ascended. This took rather longer than normal because, having done a couple of minutes at about 6m, Simon ascended to 5m and indicated that his Vyper wanted him to do another 3 mins. Stupid thing.
Simon decided he didn't want to dive with me anymore, so I was with Keith next time. We had a nice 5 hour surface interval in the pouring rain which wasn't much fun. The only highlight was the look on Keith L's face. But after that we did the Volnay. It was 5 years to the day since I'd last done it and that had been my first dive in the UK. Previously I'd managed a whole 29 mins on the wreck. This time I lasted a bit longer. (I should make some cheap shot about Simon here really). The only excitement was that my reel jammed though fortunately we did recover it on the surface.
The next day it didn't rain so much and we didn't have to hang around quite so longer before the first dive. The weather was sunny, but very windy, so we ended up doing the Dalhousie. This seemed to comprise of some very scattered wreckage and a reef that was covered in kelp. Still I've done worse dives and I managed to find some crustaceans to molest. In the afternoon we did the Volnay again as it's sheltered. Again we had quite a long surface interval, about 4 hours, so I had a bit of a sleep in my car. The viz was a bit worse this time, especially in patches where the bottom had been kicked up.
On the Monday the wind dropped and the weather was much better. Our first dive was Raglan Reef, which I insisted on despite some complaints about the lack of rusty metal. It was a great dive. I think it's probably one of the top 10 scenic dives in the country. The colours of the anemones and cup corals are fantastic. No-one seemed to be complaining after the dive, so I think I made the right choice. For the last dive we did the Spiro Agnew or something and it was OK with good viz. I did get cold a bit quickly. I think 6 dives in a row had lowered my core temperature a bit.
So all in all, not a bad weekend. The traffic home wasn't too bad. I got back by 10pm. Apparently just about everywhere else was blown out, so we were pretty lucky to get 6 dives, 5 of which were good and the other one was a bit indifferent. I didn't think Dive Action were as bad as some of the others. I think one of the problems was that he was trying to do too much especially on the bank holiday weekend. Normally you can book the whole boat for the day, but he wouldn't let us do that because he wanted to run a shuttle on the bank holiday.This was probably a good thing in the long run, because we wouldn't have filled the boat anyway. If there had been someone else to fill the bottles and the other group hadn't turned up late, it might have been OK.
If we'd gone to Porthkerris, we would have had long surface intervals too.It's true that they have more facilities there, but we would have been on a RIB and everyone would have whinged about that too. If the weather hadn't been so bad on the Saturday, we wouldn't have got off to such a bad start and I think things would have been better. I know nothing about boats, but I do know they're not supposed to run you over. At least two of us did back rolls off only to surface underneath.That really shouldn't happen and it's not pleasant when it does.
Jason
(From Alasdair Allen & Jens)
[AA] Jeni and I battled the bank holiday traffic together and taking 9 hours to get from the midlands down to Cornwall. We arrived in St. Keverne just after midnight and managed to wheedle a round of drinks out of the landlord before he called time.
Saturday was dull and it was raining heavily, not the best of weather for diving. The first dive of the day was the Mohegan which I dived with Keith Sabine. We got around 8m visibility, and I must admit to being quite impressed by its three intact boilers. A bit too intact perhaps as you couldn't have a poke around inside them. Come the end of the dive Keith and I deployed the DSMB in the lee of a big rock and got a quite impressive ride as the current swept us up and over it on the assent to the accompaniment of the bleeping of our respective computers. After going ashore we ended up doing a five hour surface interval as our skipper took another group out. Stuck on a pebble beach in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain we were most unimpressed by this turn of events.
However we did finally manage to get back in the water, the second dive of the day was the Volnay which I dived with Keith Lawrence, visibility was around 5m. Highlight of the dive for me was the massive congar which I found hiding in a pipe on the bow section of the wreck. I tried to point my find out to Keith, but he was unimpressed. Such is life...[KL : Keith was VERY impressed, so much so that I realised at once what you were looking at and stayed *WELL* out of the way. It was a very impressive congar, but I don't like eels and large congars scare the sh*t out of me!]. Returning to shore we got rained on again, and Keith Lawrence decided that enough was enough and headed home. I could see his point. Those of us that remained returned to the pub, but only managed to crawl as far as the downstairs bar for dinner. The food turned out to be perfectly respectable pub grub however, so that was okay. We all retired to bed early, none of us even made it to closing time.
Sunday dawned and after a half decent full english at the pub we ventured out to look at the weather, it had dawned sunny, bright and rather on the windy side. We were due to dive the Spyridian, but after trawling out to the dive site we were rather unimpressed by the 2m swell and the chop from the force 4 blowing at the time. We headed back inland to do the Dalhousie, and Keith Sabine nailed it on the head when he said it was like being in a kelp filled washing machine. I was diving with Gordon Henderson on his AP Valves Inspiration, and while we did manage to find a couple of pieces of wreckage, there wasn't much left of the wreck. Gordon and I were first in the water and first out (although not by much), definitely the worst dive of the weekend.
The depressingly long five hour surface interval was somewhat more bearable by being done in brilliant sunshine, however the wind was still picking up and getting back on the boat after the interval was definitely not "fun". I was amongst the more fortunate of the gang, since I'd used practically no gas on the (short) first dive, I'd left my twinset and kit aboard the hardboat. Others weren't as lucky... The second dive of the day was the Volnay again, which I dived with Gordon Henderson. We had a nice bimble around the wreck, but managed to miss the boilers entirely. Admittedly we weren't really trying that hard to find them.
Returning to shore we retired to the pub, this time we managed to make it all the way across the square to the White Hart for dinner. We were a bit put off by the prices but the food turned out to be excellent, Simon N-K and Jeni were very impressed by the crab, once they figured out how to get it out of the shell. Only a few of us managed to stagger through the evening time early closing as we were all still shattered from lugging our twinsets up and down the pebble beach all day. Jason did warn us I guess...
Monday dawned sunny with little or no wind. Arriving at the beach we looked out and were happy to see a flat calm sea. We therefore went off and did Raglan reef, getting a good 10m visibility on this rather nice pinnacle. I was diving with Gordon again and we dropped all the way to the base (around 36m) and worked our way up staying just inside my no-deco limit as we spiralled around the rocks. A great dive, even if there wasn't any rusting metal.
Since the skipper wasn't taking anyone else out between our first and second dive we got to call our own surface interval this time and a couple of hours later we were steaming out again to do the Spyridian. This turned out to be an excellent dive, with the best visibility of the weekend, easily 10 to 15m again. Not only that Gordon and I managed a swim through of the boiler and quick in and out under several other pieces of wreckage. In the end we drifted off the wreck and had a poke around the rather nice reef it was lying on.
Back on shore we sorted ourselves out and headed for home, with Jeni and I managing to make the trip back to the midlands in only 6 hours due to the very light traffic. On the whole a good weekend's diving, although I feel honour bound to have a moan about the poor mixes that the skipper provided. Repeatedly asking for 36% brought us mixes that ranged from anywhere between 28 and 38%. Not great. I'm not convinced I'd use the same skipper again.
[Jens] Actually I had a good time, the dives were fun, viz was good, but the organisation of DiveAction left a lot to be desired. As someone else pointed out...delays are sometimes unavoidable, what was so damn frustrating was the constant underestimate of the time the next dive would be ready to run, so we spent a lot of time sitting around in not too good weather (especially Saturday and Sunday) when we could have been toasting over a nice pub lunch.
One thing Gary did do very well was lay the shot. If memory serves me, every shot was spot on, so no hunting for wrecks on the bottom, possible exception the kelp washing machine, but I'm not convinced there was a wreck there to shot :-) The nitrox fills were almost all pretty well off spec....probably due to the rush, but that didn't make it any less frustrating, its a good thing we weren't working to tight limits. All in all I would say the operation was sloppy...BUT the company was good, and I learnt a lot which is always a good thing.
Thanks to Jason for organising it!
(From Simon)
Not much really to add. Except:
1. Jason is the laziest diver I have ever dived with. I can see now why he does so well on a singles, while I get the "air hoover" award on twins. BTW, my lowest SLM was 11.6, highest 17.2...
2. Never dive with an exploration reel instead of a proper DSMB one, 'cos once you've lost the tensioning nut, it's a right pain.
3. Jason is a wookie. I'm pretty much convinced of this.
4. I will not darken Dive Action's door again. Successfully hitting most members of your customers with your hardboat is not the done thing. Swearing at me is also a bit of a no-no. Had the boat not been one of those annoyingly narrow affairs and there been a load of divers in the way, I'm sure the story of our trip would have been a lot more interesting.
I had left my fins on the boat. We disembarked close to shore and it was wadeable. Well, we did have the first inauguration of the UKRS Synchronised Swimming Team (visualise 6 divers swimming with flailing arms coast-wards towards a party of onlookers, merrily p*ssing themselves). Getting back out to the boat was a nightmare - the skipper decided to run me down twice and then pull right back and expect me to swim out to him. Notwithstanding, I got a tad upset. I was answered by a stream of invective pointing out that I could get off his f*cking boat if I wanted to and that he was not in a position to "ruin his boat" for any old diver. That man is not going to get my business again. I will not resort to the words that I used to describe him at the time, for that would be undiplomatic and not like me at all.
5. Thanks to Chewie (sorry, Jason) for organising the trip and for putting up with our constant whinging. This only stopped while diving, whereupon Gordon could be heard muttering into his Expiration and Stroke-boy (Al) could be heard humming the Hamster Song [AA : No fair! I wasn't humming the Hamster Song, it was the theme song to the Flintstones...now Weymouth, in Weymouth I was humming the Hampster Song].
Let's do it again... but preferably not with that awful dive operation.
