Hi and ho!
There was no blog post last week due to me helping out on a beginners course for scuba diving in my club and didn't do any diving of note really. This week however, i was back to the usual shenanigans, me and some friends went to the western-most of our regular dive spots, Skår, which is close to the ferry across Gullmarfjorden. We got to the site got our gears out the car and started kitting up for the dive, while also dividing into buddy pairs.
 |
| Common dragonet male, as vivid as they always are. |
Dive 1: The "catastrophe"
Depth: 23 m, Time: 38 minutes, Temp: 6 °C
Me and my buddy waded into the water and put the fins on, swam out for a bit and then started descending. We descended in a orderly fashion, today the visibility was good, and the conditions light, we followed the bottom downwards and outwards, we turned towards the right rather than the left like one usually does (turned out to be a bit of miscommunication between me and my buddy). Anyways, we kept following the bottom closely, staying at between 19 and 20 m depth for the most part. After a while, my buddy signaled me that we were to turn around, so that we did following the sloping bottom upwards. At about 15 m, we encountered a boulder which we started following upwards, at about 12 m depth, the "catastrophe" happened, I saw that my buddy was starting to flail, and floating upwards, so I started grabbing them, trying to pull them down and into trim, allowing them to ventilate the excess air of their suit. But as I did this, I started to feel cramps in both my calves, which I toughed out for a bit, before the pain got too intense and I couldn't even move my legs anymore. At this point I had to release the grip on my buddy, and let them "cork" from 12 m, not an ideal thing, but something that I had to do at that point. I blew my safety stop and ascended quickly to the surface to check the condition of my buddy at the surface, they seemed ok, if a bit agitated about the whole situation of corking. We swam towards land, while discussing the situation a bit, turned out they had a bit of a constant bubbling leak from their regulator 2nd stage, which in turn had annoyed them the whole dive, the reason for the uncontrolled ascent was at this point still unknown. We got onto land and doffed our gear, preparing for a surface intervall, all while discussing the incident that happened.
 |
| Sponge of unknown species, likely a Suberites ficus |
Dive 2: The calm dive.
Depth: 19 m, Time: 45 min, Temp: 6°C
After a longer surface intervall, me and my buddy got ready for a second dive, this time, we had another buddy with us, as one in the second dive pair didn't feel like doing another dive (which is fair, the waters are still cold). We donned our gear and got into the water, this time, I was asked to check for bubbling from their gear when we were going downwards. We descended in an orderly fashion, following the cliff walls and slopes downwards, I checked for bubbles every now and then, but found none that were indicating any leaks. We swam around for a bit before it was time to turn around, we swam back in a orderly fashion and without any incidents. After doing our safety stop, i decided that i wanted do do a small drill with inversion, to see if I could fix a "inversion event". So that i did, and it turned out that I indeed can do that, I also managed to kick one of my buddies straight up to the surface (which we were close to, we were sitting at like 2-3 m depth). We surfaced without incident and swam to land, still discussing what had occurred on the dive before, We concluded that most likely, it was a case of the suit not being able to vent the excess air due to something getting stuck in the exhaust valve.
All in all, it was a nice dive day, even if the first dive was a bit too "eventful" at the end there.
So until next time! Keep on swimming!
 |
| The polychaete Oxydromus flexuosus |
No comments:
Post a Comment