Back to Stoney again, which meant another 4 am start. Had planned to meet up with Andy Cox and Andy Horwood. However Andy H had to pull out because of a chest infection.

Very wet driving up and before the first dive, however it did ease off later in the day.

Today was the first try out of my new dry suit and my pony bottle.

For the first dive we decided to underwater navigate to the Stanegarth, should have been easy but the viz was pretty poor, so needless to say we missed it. We wandered over the deep zone and had to turn back. As we came up to the 7 metre ledge I became quite buoyant and took another weight from Andy at the surface.

At the end of the dive I got a cramp as I was trying to correct a slight “legs up” position.

Second dive was much better as we descended down the line to the Stanegarth. We explored here for a while and then tried to find the Wessex. We succeeded in finding a Jeep and did not find the Wessex until we were just about to come up to the 7 metre ledge. A very comfortable dive which resulted in my lowest SAC to date. Still nothing to write home about but any improvement is welcome. See SAC Calculations.

So on to the third dive. We planned an underwater nav to the coach, which we missed, so we followed the 22 metre ledge until we found it. As we reached the coach my reg started to free flow. I signalled to Andy and tried to cure the problem by banging the reg several times on the coach. No luck so I checked my gauge and saw that I only had 40 bar left, so I signalled to Andy that I needed to go up.

I switched to the pony reg, which had been set up with the reg purged but the valve turned off…..Mistake!!!

Given the circumstances, cold hands, no air, I fumbled for the valve but could not open it. As I was already moving upwards I decided that it would be better to forget the pony and control my buoyancy.

The ascent was undertaken with me constantly exhaling, good job I remembered something. Upon reaching the surface the rescue boat was with us almost immediately as they had seen everything from the shop.

Andy’s dive profile later showed that the first 7 metres of ascent was quite controlled. Whereas the last 13 metres (42 feet) took only 20 seconds. Oops…

Well that was the first “incident” that I have had to deal with. Although the situation was handled fairly well there is no doubt that lessons were learned and given a repeat incident I believe I could have done things differently.

1) Dive with the pony valve open.

2) Should have asked for Andy’s alternate air source.