I followed the coast towards Exeter, and then cut straight across Dartmoor to Tavistock where I was catching up with my friend Nigel and a group of his diving buddies. I invited myself onto their diving plans for the weekend and on the Saturday morning we were off to the coast near Plymouth for a couple of wreck dives.
I had done a couple of dry suit dives before, but not in a while, and I am used to somewhat more tropical conditions, with slightly different kit requirements. With the naive expectation that the guys in the shop did this often enough they would kit me out properly, I found myself on the boat after we'd left harbour and my friend Nigel then asks, "Hood?" "Uh, no." "Gloves?" "No, didn't get any of them either." I got the feeling I was not the most popular uninvited party guest of all time.
Fortunately there was someone on the other boat with a spare hood, the gloves I was going to have to live without. It turned out this was not to be my only issue for the day. On my first dive I soon found as I was exploring the wreck we were on, that the regulator (the bit I breathe through) worked perfectly if I held my head mostly upright, but if I looked straight down and the regulator became horizontal, it leaked, and water misted into the airflow. Even breathing a tiny amount of salt water, a mere mist, is a very unpleasant thing to do to your lungs. I quickly figured out the head position thing and kept diving, keeping my chin thrust forward a little to maintain a dry air supply.
Gradually the cold from my hands spread up my forearms, the water after all was only 8 degrees. Olivia found a spider crab, and then Nigel showed up holding a pipe fish. In my excitement I forgot my air supply problem, and looked down at the pipefish, and then in my flailing about to try and get my head upright so I could breathe again I nearly took out Nigel, Olivia and the pipefish. Flapping my arms and legs around needs a lot of space.
Communication underwater is done with hand signals, so things are kept pretty simple. "My regulator is fucked, and sprays water into my lungs whenever I look down, but it's ok now, I can breathe again" is a little bit complicated for hand signals. So I just gave the sign for I'm OK, and they just gave me funny looks which said "you bloody well didn't look it!" and kept swimming, albeit casting regular glances at me to make sure I was after all actually OK. Not done yet, about this time I realised that my air supply pressure gauge hadn't moved in 10 minutes. Now supplementing my air with water wasn't go to offset my intake, and the fact that I was still alive to notice this, I must have taken at least the occasional breath. Excellent, no hood or gloves, a dodgy regulator and a faulty air pressure gauge, this crew were rating very highly in my book right now, and the list of expletives in my mind was growing nastier.
This at least was a more simple message to explain, with a couple of signals and thrusting my gauge across, Nigel could see that I had a lot more air left than even an air miser like myself was entitled to have this far into a dive. As an air miser, the opposite of an air pig, I was confident that I would have pretty close to the same air left as the others, and was sure that I wasn't about to gulp my last breath at 20 metres. This would have been bad, I've never needed to grab a dive buddies alternate (2nd regulator), and didn't want to ruin my record, it was however prudent to make our way up slowly. About the time we tried to explain to Olivia that we were going up because I had a dodgy air gauge I sucked down 80bar in one breath, and my gauge was now working again. That 2nd regulator I mentioned, yeah I had one of them too, it never occurred to me at the time that I could use that instead of the leaky main regulator.
Luckily, due to yet another issue I'd had with having the wrong inflator hose for the dry suit inflator, we had a complete spare set of regs and hoses on board, dive number 2 would be much more pleasant.
Unfortunately for Jo, one of the other divers, she lost her weight belt getting back onboard the boat, and her partner Mark was unable to find them. Which meant I had a small pair of gloves to borrow for the second dive, it's amazing the difference a few millimetres thickness of neoprene makes.
The dive guys on the boat must have said something because the shop owner apologised for trying to kill me, and gave me a discount. The plus for the day was unlike my previous experience in a dry suit that wasn't, this one had stayed nice and dry all day.
The next day the rest of the crowd were only doing one dive, and hiring a dry suit for one dive is ridiculously expensive, so I opted to go exploring the moor instead. I will cover this in a later post, as I returned to Dartmoor a week later. After the extensive list of hassles from the day before I think they were all a little relieved that I wasn't going with them, just in case.
In the mean time, after the diving crowd had dispersed back to their homes and jobs, I set off further south along the Devon coast towards Cornwall.
