Freesteel

Regular blogging has been delayed due to a lack of pictures. Becka keeps swiping the camera, downloading the files onto her computer because mine is full, and stashing everything away in her own office. But plenty has been happening.

The North Wales Caving Club scheduled a rescue practice in Parys Mountain, Anglesey for Sunday 21 September. The weather was sunny and flat calm, so we got in gear and got out there on Saturday for a paddle out of Amlwch harbour

We dived on a very silty wreck of a barge just outside the harbour. As usual, Chris Holden’s guidebook was spot on, and the anchor dropped right directly onto the metal. Once down, I wrapped it round a post and, because the wreck was small, we left the anchor for a tour round the sea floor and in and over the wreckage. The tide was ebbing and running west towards the Irish Sea, but creating a strong back-eddy that swept north across the wreck. We had to pull ourselves back over the top all the way to the stern where I realized I had no idea where the anchor was. Becka heard me huff. What a screw-up. I always knew that losing contact with the anchor when kayak diving was a bad idea. If we swam we’d have quite a hard climb along the rocky shore. But we found it in the end, which was a relief in an otherwise murky dive.

We paddled along the coast back to the campsite, Becka climbed out, while I carried on to Porth Eilian and carried everything out across the stinky mud while Becka cycled with my caving wetsocks for shoes to fetch the car.

The next day I sent her up to Parys Mountain by bike, while I explored the closed footpaths for a couple of miles between the campsite and the hill, arriving half an hour late. Unfortunately, this delay got upgraded to a dire emergency, and Becka had gone all round the hill twice in a fluster (not finding me, because I was on a footpath), and then gone back to fetch the car. Meanwhile I listened to the rescue scenario briefing waiting for her to show up.

I think we need to get a mobile phone. Or two. Hopefully this will eliminate unnecessary self-inflicted stress situations such as this. Mobile phones don’t improve things, because all of their advantages are adapted away.

We then wasted the afternoon sitting in on a very long Caving Club AGM, instead of making use of the continuing fine weather, because it was windy from the north the next day.

After an hour of dithering, and watching the wind get heavier, we retreated to the shelter of the Menai Strait. Having not looked at the tide tables, it was hard to know what to expect. We paddled from the Menai Bridge up to Bangor Pier, the current flowing with us for part of the way. The book said something about the point of slack water moving down the Strait from Beaumaris over a period of hours. With the wind and tide flow, the anchored boats were in all different directions and it was hard to tell what was going on.

Becka kindly looked after the top-side while I had a quick dive on Perch Rock to the north of the Menai Suspension Bridge. It wasn’t bad, but the visibility wasn’t as excellent as I’d hoped after all that settled weather. It was just at the level where you could see the fish. Normally they stay just beyond the average visibility distance in that water.

We headed back under the bridge to the south side of the bridge into the Swellies. The current was still flowing north. I had another little solo dive near that point where it was all whirlpooly-like. I went down here:

and came up here:

It was a pretty pleasant drift dive along the jagged rock floor while holding the anchor of the canoe. I’d always wanted to do this. Becka said the boat didn’t seem to move until the very end of the dive when I swam a long way looking for some shallower water to do a safety stop. Also, lots of sailboats went motoring through, so it was lucky that there was someone top-side to keep them off. (Two empty canoes always looks a bit suspicious, if you don’t know what the A-flag means.)

And that was perhaps the last sensible diving weekend of the year.

My long-planned visit to Pembrokeshire to see my old club UBUC on their annual Skomer trip was delayed by going to Mashed -08 on the weekend of Saturday 21 June, a canceled visit by a friend on Wednesday, and Becka’s sudden urge to review a paper throughout all of Thursday, punctuated by five-a-side football at lunchtime and the secretary’s leaving do in the afternoon.

We got away at 6:30pm, so it was no surprise we arrived in Marloes at mid-night completely knackered and cross. There didn’t seem to be anybody at West Hook Farm, the site of UBUC’s Skomer summer encampment for the last 30-odd years, as well as implied by the map on this page of their modern-looking but informationally-challenged website. The farm had changed hands and no longer did camping. But I didn’t know that, so we rolled a further kilometre down the road into East Hook Farm and moved into the late night arrivals field. I ran back along the bumpy Pembrokeshire Coast Path in the dark back to West Hook Farm and into the field just to check my memory wasn’t completely lost. The last time I’d been there was in 2003 — but many formative times before then because it was an annual migration.

I spent the whole of the next day (Friday) looking for where the f*** UBUC had gone. There were at least 20 of them, two boats, and everyone I spoke to recognized who I was looking for. The carpark attendant for Martin’s Haven said they always got here for an early start when they do. Perhaps they were over at Dale the bad weather diving spot in Milford Haven. No one was there either. I’d spotted the UBUC trailer on the beach of Martin’s Haven when I cycled to it in the morning, so they had to be somewhere.

During the day I implemented my own version of the Directionless by phoning up and bothering a friend at his computer on the internet and getting him to check out the dreadful, misinformative, and utterly useless UBUC calender website containing times but No Precise Locations, and he confirmed it was that bad. There were email contacts but no phone numbers. Great. No email reply was forthcoming during the day.

Now, the reason why I urgently needed to see UBUC was that they had their dive kayaks down on site, and it might have been the first time in 6 years of kayak diving that I would get the chance to kayak dive with another pair, apart from me and Becka. Why do I always get hooked on such astonishingly unpopular sports!

Between Marloes and Broad Haven there’s about a dozen campsites on the OS Landranger map. I checked them all.

It’s worth pointing out that the weather was also pretty windy, with a howling southerly gale and belts of rain the day before. Just so we got something done during the day, Becka and I paddled out of St Bride’s Haven round Nabbs Head and into the full force of a localized rain storm. This woke us up a bit and made us appreciate how small our problems really could be made if something went wrong. Especially when we turned around and it got much more difficult to ride on the downwind leg.

Back in Dale we had a cup of coffee in the cafe and the woman said, Yeah, that group of students were in here yesterday, wringing wet from the rain. I closed up at five and they all moved into the pub and sat there drinking pints of water all night trying to keep warm without spending any money. She thought they could be up at a farm called Hillside, which was not signed on the OS map as a campsite. Windmill Farm next door was not signed as a campsite either, yet I found a lovely laid out field with level plots and all. The farmer had seen UBUC on the beach when he took fuel down to the boat that carries tourists to Skomer Island, but didn’t know where they could be.

After dinner back at the campsite of West Hook Farm I cycled across the abandoned air field in the fog to Dale, double checking the fields around Hillside farm. The owner of West Hook Farm was convinced they’d be there, because that’s where he recommended they go after turning them down for his campsite. I had half a pint in the pub in case anybody showed up. To complete my perfect timing, Mr. West Hook Farm decided to phone Mr. Hillside Farm on our behalf and found out that the UBUC had f***ed off from Pembrokeshire that morning. He told Becka this news minutes after I had set off.

Bollocks!

The weather was apparently really good on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. It must have been the sudden shock of a day of rain that drove them away. Had it been drizzly for all that time, they’d have probably suffered it, because evidence suggests it was a very snap decision, possibly taken after I got there, but couldn’t find them.

Why do we bother trying coming out diving when the weather is so bad? Becka asked. Well, I would have preferred to have got out on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Anyway, we got on the kayaks on Saturday (without diving gear) and paddled around Wooltack Point and down the length Jack Sound. No I didn’t understand any of the tides, I just pretended I did to give Becka the confidence I knew what I was doing. I was sure it was going to be flowing north — against us — but I didn’t have any idea how strong it would be. Nor could I predict how far we were going to get. Or that Becka’s greatest whinge was that her kayak’s knee straps were the wrong length. There’s always got to be something wrong; at least it wasn’t: Oh my god we’re going to die out here!

We ran into Robert Bailey as we carried our kayaks back up the beach.

Then we headed over to Abercastle for another bit of paddling. Becka had been reading the thoroughly excellent Welsh Sea Kayaking guidebook and decided we should aim for Abereiddy, a mere 8kms along the rugged coast.

Once again I faked it with the currents, but we were going into the howling wind, so I was sure we could just be blown back. It was wind against tide, as they say, so it was a bit of a roller-coaster ride and we got about a kilometre along and decided to turn back at the first corner. The waves are always worst at the corners. Going round the corner further meant we’d be up-wind of some rather rocky cliffs, and anyway I was beginning to appraise the rather brisk current going with us. More concerning to me was the two fully kitted out sea kayakers whom we passed in Abercastle Harbour after they had turned back owing to the weather on their trip to Strumble Head. I was absolutely sure they were going to call out the life-boat having just seen two clowns on sit-on-top kayaks disappear to sea and not come back.

In my experience, sit-on-tops are a lot more seaworthy and robust than anything else. They are the mountain bikes of the kayaking world — not suitable for racing long distances across flat seas, but better for the bumps. We surfed back briskly against the current to the harbour. Becka said she preferred Jack Sound. The sun was out. We camped in Trefin for the night.

We went back to Abercastle in the morning to complete one dive on the Leysian to prove a point. This is a huge silty wreck in 10m and we carried the anchor the whole way. My suit leaks so bad around the wrists I have to do something about it soon. (Un)luckily we won’t do any diving for the next two months because time has run out and we’re now into the caving expedition season.

Oh well.

We cased out a few likely kayaking journeys on the north Pembrokeshire coast from the sea kayak guidebook before declaring the weekend done and heading for home. Becka observed that not one of the photos in the book was of weather as nasty as what we’d been out in. We’ll have to come back at a better time. With whom? I wish.

This blog posting has been marked up with links to geographical articles in Wikipedia. This means that it contains a form of unique-ids common across the world, and could insert this post into a cross-sectional blog sliced up from everybody else’s and recreated timesorted per location as a common heritage. It’s all going to work well unless those stupid students carry on balkanizing the web with their useless Facebook log-in shite pages, and it’s eventually not possible to access anything useful on the internet unless it is produced by (a) a corporation, or (b) a “friend”.

I had to write the Jack Sound article, which someone out there can expand, put some pictures onto and describe other stuff to make it nice. I realized it was legitimate when I discovered an article for an insignificant rocklet south of Ramsey Island. Keener people could try and revive Wikiscuba with some content.

I’ve done a full photographic write-up for last weekend receiving intromediate instruction over in Anglesey.

Below is a video of my failed attempt at rolling.

Some pictures and notes from three weekends that didn’t make it onto the blog on time.

At the end of April, Becka and I headed down to Babbacombe beach near Tor Bay on the invitation to teach a couple of divers how to dive from kayaks. As usual, they had bought the inflatable kind, probably because it was once advertised (and reviewed) in the national diving magazine. There has been never been coverage (since eight years ago) of the proper type of dive kayak, made from hard plastic and somewhat more sea-worthy, so few people know to get it instead. Ah, that corporate money-driven journalism attitude gets everywhere and prevents things getting reported on its merits. One day the world will catch up.

We had hoped it was the season for spring cuttlefish mating. Unfortunately, we missed seeing any, but we did find a patch of bivalves up to something or other.

In between discovering just how extraordinarily unfit divers can be at paddling kayaks, we ticked off a couple of dives in the bay, such as Morris Rogue. The guide writer for that site begins his description:

If I was a fish, and quite often I wish I was, I would want to live here.

No he wouldn’t. It’s wall-to-wall fat dalia anemonies. They sting.

It was an excellent dive.

We tried to find it using the transits, before giving up and heading for the pot buoy that marked it in the current.

That was a successful weekend.

The weekend before was a Becka’s choice. We went to Snailbeach mine in Shropshire, which was cold and full of loose rock. As you can see, the way to the next level is down a rope between the ore-cart rails. There was probably a solid floor there when they put in the tracks originally.

The week after Babbacombe and Tor Bay we visited Anglesey where a friend of ours was over from Ireland to attend the Sea Kayak Symposium. No one paid any attention to us, or asked us for tickets, probably because we had the wrong kind of kayaks.

The weather was less than ideal and there was an unimpressive upset in a big wave as we tried to get off the beach. We got by with our stumpy dive kayaks, but the proper sea kayak back-flipped and was sent towards the rocks in danger of a good scraping.

On Sunday the whole island was covered with a bitterly cold dense sea fog, which wasn’t very fun. We’d had enough of winter conditions for one year, so Becka and I departed and drove all the way round the north coast of Anglesey in and out of blazing sunshine searching for a break in the coastal cloud.

We found the cut-off point at Puffin Island, parked near Beaumaris, and paddled along the boring sandy beach, and around the corner on the wrong side of the light-house where the misty cliffs were spooky. Across the strait, just out of sight in the fog, sea kayakers playing in the over-falls like ghosts.

We pulled up for lunch by a small stream that dribbled on a huge slab of rock and made it slippery with moss. The tide had gone out significantly by the time we turned back, so we had to go round the light-house on the correct side, and then discovered this big ship-wreck near the beach where we had launched.

Many things are hidden under the sea. Next weekend we’ll go for a course to learn about this proper sea kayaking. Might take our dive kayaks for a play on Friday if the weather is good.

Things falling behind here. With all these distractions like seeing a public inquiry and expanding wikipedia articles such as SS Castilian as I have just taken order of Volume 2 of the best dive guide ever (coz it covers my local area). Only thing wrong with it is there’s no kayak diving.

I have to try to do less with wikipedia. It must be those marine wrecks which caused me to find the
UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage (not signed by the UK). Anyway, it has to stop. Not even when attracted by a page with the title Middle Mouse.

I’ve got lots of serious HSMWorks bugs piling up which need sorting out NOW! Too many days lost on the constant scallop again. I discovered better ways to choose the place to subdivide the cells. Many issues disappeared, I hope.

Over the weekend of 25 November, Becka and I made it to Dublin to stay with a friend who has recently taken up sea kayaking. I have finally downloaded the pictures a month late.

Here is Becka showing how to capsize and not stay under for long enough to get rescued. It worked the second time. I was astounded at the slickness of the procedure for emptying the boat (assisted by water-tight bulkheads fore and aft of the cockpit whose existence I didn’t know about), and re-entry (you lift your weight against the paddle straddling the empty boat and slip your legs in).

The next day we did a kayak dive in Dalkey Sound, it feeling being very exposed to go any further out, and having found a deep bit close inshore to the cliffs (about 18metres). The current was strengthening, Becka got tangled up in fishing line, but got free before I managed to untangle my knife from its holder and then lose it for good trying to put it back (I think this needs some attention). The visibility was similarly atrocious (though there was a lot of life), and the best bit was getting back out and on land.

We even went and sat in a cafe for an hour with a big cup of hot chocolate, which is unusual. Turned out we were both coming down with the winter vomiting virus, which accounted for the slackness.

Kayak diving is always a bit on the edge, and I will be ordering a marine radio for after Christmas. Still, there’s much worse nutters out there, as I heard on the Sea Kayak podcast on the way home, where some guy paddled solo to St Kilda, Shetland, and all the other Scottish islands in one go, and his rescue plan was an EPIRB. Since it takes a few hours to recover the body out at sea (living or dead) when its position is accurately known, and he wasn’t wearing a drysuit (not practical for such long durations), he had a diving wetsuit which he was going to somehow climb into while bobbing out at sea and not so gradually freezing to death. My immediate response was: “It’s been a while since he’s tried putting on a wetsuit.” Even on land it takes a lot of effort.

The other notable thing about sea kayak camping over long durations is that the food is absolutely terrible. They’ll proudly boast how they ate pasta and soup for weeks on end. Maybe being out at sea is such an overwhelming experience you don’t notice it at all.

A quick logging of another weekend (13 October) before it gets lost down the memory hole. Becka and I drove up to Brighouse Bay on the north coast of the Solway Firth to try a little bit of kayak diving after it had been sold so well by an episode of Simon Willis’s kayak podcast.

I’d say it was a little bit over-sold, but we got there and ticked it off. I made one dive along the cliffs to the west of Brighouse Bay where the sea charts advertized a deep (15m) area. It was actually rocky, not sandy, like the rocks of the cliffs above water (at a depth of 9m at high tide) with many prawns in the crevices. But the visibility was — as anticipated — atrocious. A Geordie who was with a group of jet-skiers in the bay when we came back in said the visibility can be great, but wouldn’t be because of the westerly winds blowing in all week. He didn’t say any more. Becka tried to have a dive, but I’d accidentally put a big hole in her suit the night before as I was trying to saw off and replace her leaking inlet valve (Northern Diver seem to apply glue to the threads) which I didn’t notice until she got into the water and bubbles came out of her chest.

That evening we locked a bike up in Gatehouse of Fleet, and the next morning paddled out opposite Ardwall Island, round and landed on Murray’s Isles (picture), and then in up the water of the fleet with the flooding tide.

Becka thought this was all pretty lazy, but we stopped on a couple of beaches along the way to see a pillar and a chapel before carrying on in up the canal.

The canal was swampy with lots of swamp gas bubbling up everywhere as we did a nice river amble. Not once did we see another canoe, rowing boat, or sailing boat at any time, which I found surprising. I fell asleep in the park as she cycled back to fetch the car. We ate a huge dinner at her parent’s house in Lancaster both on Friday on the drive up, and on Sunday on the drive down.

No one to see in Edinburgh. But I did discover this fine pub called The Auld Hoose across the road with free WiFi, good beer and good food, and spent plenty of time there. I didn’t wake up in time to photograph Becka huddling across the road from it at 8am in the morning in the drizzle downloading her email from their router which was obviously left on.

Then after the conference we went to St Abbs with our kayaks and managed to do six dives in 24 hours, as well as stumbling across a famous caver while out on the sea. He had recently moved to Eyemouth and had found his kayaks in a dumpster, and had in fact tried our kayak-diving off an inflatable.

I have just wasted my time writing two new wikipedia articles: HMS Port Napier and Flame shell.