xdjio
Contributor
Buddy and I had a nice dive today! The viz was decent but nothing special - 5 or 6 m at most. Water temps were good, 7 degrees or so.
This was my first dive using Marigolds with the SI Tech classic rings and WOW! I will never dive wet gloves ever again. It's just too luxurious having dry hands.
The plan was to stick to 15m max and explore near the little islet on the left side of the bay, then follow the bottom contour over to the wall on the right and swim back in. The waves and surge seemed bigger today than usual - a bit of a tiring surface swim. More on that surf later. Max depth, 14.7m meters (avg 10.7). My sac on this dive was high but much improved over previous dives - I got my weight and trim dialled in really nice on this one. 33L/min surface equivalent (68L @ 10.7m).
Overall the dive was nice but nothing to write home about. Buddy's rental mask was a bit of a poor fit and kept flooding, there was a lot of mask clearing going on. Gave me a chance to practice my own mask clears along with him though for moral support, ha. A downer though was a leak in the elbow of my suit - small, but over the course of a dive it added up to a soaked right arm and right half of my torso and thigh. I was doing fine with it as long as we kept moving, but as we approached the right hand side of the bay conditions got siltier and siltier.
Couple that silt with a popped-off fin strap i turned around to fix, and like that, in an instant I had lost my buddy, who had previous been only 3m behind me. Training and rational thought kicked in. We later discovered we had only been about 6 or 7 m apart at the very most, but that doesn't help when the viz is only 1 m or so. We were both looking for each other for 2 or maybe 3 minutes, and then found each other after an uneventful free ascent for each of us. At least my nav skills were sound, we surfaced exactly where I had expected us to be.
However the waves played a role on the surface - there was some looking-around, trying to peer over wave crests and into troughs. I found myself thinking how handy it would have been to have had a marker buoy to shoot - both as a reference for my own ascent, and to give my buddy a little bit of an easier time searching on the surf.
Maybe I'll buy one and practice some skills with it! I had a good length conversation with my LDS about use of DSMBs but any tips here are welcome.
However those few minutes of relative stillness in our search let the cold get a real grip on me, especially with half my undergarments soaked. We played it safe and called off the planned second dive - I just knew getting back in there would chill me to the bone.
This was my first dive using Marigolds with the SI Tech classic rings and WOW! I will never dive wet gloves ever again. It's just too luxurious having dry hands.
The plan was to stick to 15m max and explore near the little islet on the left side of the bay, then follow the bottom contour over to the wall on the right and swim back in. The waves and surge seemed bigger today than usual - a bit of a tiring surface swim. More on that surf later. Max depth, 14.7m meters (avg 10.7). My sac on this dive was high but much improved over previous dives - I got my weight and trim dialled in really nice on this one. 33L/min surface equivalent (68L @ 10.7m).
Overall the dive was nice but nothing to write home about. Buddy's rental mask was a bit of a poor fit and kept flooding, there was a lot of mask clearing going on. Gave me a chance to practice my own mask clears along with him though for moral support, ha. A downer though was a leak in the elbow of my suit - small, but over the course of a dive it added up to a soaked right arm and right half of my torso and thigh. I was doing fine with it as long as we kept moving, but as we approached the right hand side of the bay conditions got siltier and siltier.
Couple that silt with a popped-off fin strap i turned around to fix, and like that, in an instant I had lost my buddy, who had previous been only 3m behind me. Training and rational thought kicked in. We later discovered we had only been about 6 or 7 m apart at the very most, but that doesn't help when the viz is only 1 m or so. We were both looking for each other for 2 or maybe 3 minutes, and then found each other after an uneventful free ascent for each of us. At least my nav skills were sound, we surfaced exactly where I had expected us to be.
However the waves played a role on the surface - there was some looking-around, trying to peer over wave crests and into troughs. I found myself thinking how handy it would have been to have had a marker buoy to shoot - both as a reference for my own ascent, and to give my buddy a little bit of an easier time searching on the surf.
Maybe I'll buy one and practice some skills with it! I had a good length conversation with my LDS about use of DSMBs but any tips here are welcome.
However those few minutes of relative stillness in our search let the cold get a real grip on me, especially with half my undergarments soaked. We played it safe and called off the planned second dive - I just knew getting back in there would chill me to the bone.
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