Jordfall 7/8 2021 Silt clouds and fresh divers.

 Hi and ho!

Once again, new week and new adventures. This time we went to a site where we haven't been in a while due to various circumstances, the Jordfall marina. We also brought with us a newly certified diver for their first out of course dive. We were originally supposed to be 4 people, but one of us got a sore throat the night before and thus decided to sit this one out. Either way, after picking the bottles up, together with the rest of the gear, we headed to the site. There were surprisingly many people on the dive site this day, even as the weather reports had been telling of rain and thunder, but we managed to find ourselves a parking spot close enough to the gear-up point. We made our dive plans, did our checks and headed out for the first dive.

Close-up of a North sea tube anemone.

Dive 1:

Depth: 18 m, Time: 47 min, Temp 17 C

We swam out to the cliff, where we decided that it was a good place to descend. The fresh diver wanted to do some checks on about 5 m of depth, which they did while we hung about for a bit. After the checks were done, we continued to swim, following the wall downwards and west. It soon became clear that something was not quite right going on, they were standing almost vertically in the water column, with their fins in the bottom, making big silt clouds in the water column. The silt cloud is to be expected, but standing vertically in the water column isn't.

Either way, after a while i had enough of it and signalled that we were to turn around, as i felt that we couldn't continue the dive like this. We swam back towards the entry point and did our safety stops before ascending to the surface. At the surface, i got the new diver to do a weighting check after emptying their stuff down to about 40 bars. Turns out they were indeed grossly overweighed, needing about 6 kg of lead instead of the 10 kg i had given them, so it kind of was on me a bit that they were having some issues there.

After doing the weight check, we got up from the water and ready for the surface intervall.

Mud sagartia, a small but somewhat colourful anemone

Dive 2

Depth: 18 m, Time: 57 min, Temp 17 C

After a surface intervall with food and talks, it became time to head out into the waters once more. The plan was about the same as the previous dive, try to not go below 18 m of depth, and follow the wall. Said and done, we swam out to the cliff, but this time, we swam a little bit further out, so we rounded the corner a bit, before descending. This time, the new diver had a much better position in the water, even if they still kicked up quite the cloud of silt, but then again, so did i too. We swam along the wall and bottom towards the south west, quite the distance before it became time to turn around. At the safety stop, i decided to try and deploy the surface marker buoy for training, which went kind of ok-ish this time around. We surfaced at 57 minutes, got up and doffed our gear, preparing to go home.

All in all, despite the problems on the first dive, it was a nice dive day.

So until next time! Keep on swimming!

Orange-brown aeolid on some fallen down red algae.