Alastair(Offline)

Monday and we loaded our dive boat RJRW. Due to some difficulties with Lamlash Grahame had arranged to use RJRW for the dive platform. We loaded the gear and set off for the wreck site.



Everyone geared up for the dive. The initial objectives were:

Team 1 – Rich, John Kendall, David
Secure shotline and run the north line from the shot.

Team 2 – Al, Clare
Run the south line from the shot

Team 3 – Osama, Rob
Tour wreck and orientate

Team 4 – Joe, Gareth
Tour wreck and orientate

Team 1 and 2 completed their objectives and this gave us a solid north south reference to run act as our baseline.



Comments from the individual divers

Clare
I tied in to the pipe at the bottom of the shot and followed Al who was trying to set a Southern bearing for the line. I haven’t done too much line laying at 56 metres with lots of stages to manage so this took a little longer than I would have liked but we didn’t have too much distance to travel before we ran out of wreck. After 15 or so metres we hit the shale sea bed and despite looking further out we realised that there was little more lying in this direction. Al turned the team back towards the wreck site and I reeled back, tying off on the last obvious piece of wreckage. A small kit issue meant that when we switched off the bottom stages we had to thumb the dive so a short but sweet introduction to the week.






After the team had reboarded the boat the weather necessitated a return to shore. We swapped sets over and stages but unfortunately as we left shelter the weather was too rough and we aborted dive 2.

Talking to Rob after the dives he remarked he’d been pleasantly surprised how easy it was to come and join a more regular group. He found he was able to leap in for a 50m dive with someone who he had never met before but could have confidence in their abilities and comfort from the shared expectations and familiar processes.

Gas filling followed for the dive we had done. We had our own 02 and Helium on Lamlash provided by Breakwater Dive Center and were then doing all the air tops at breakwater. We turned round 11 twinsets, 7 bottom stages, 22 nitrox 50% stages and 11 oxygen fills in a couple of hours and were ready for Tuesday. Anyone who reckons you can’t do trimix in less than 24 hours is talking rubbish



At the end of the day we collated the information from all the divers and began building a map of the wreck site referencing objects based on the 5m knotted exploration lines we’d installed on the north south bearing. This let us build a set of objectives for the diving on day 2.

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Helium is our friend - GI3