Freesteel Blog » Kayak Dive

Sunday, April 27th, 2014 at 3:09 pm - - Kayak Dive 1 Comment »

We went to Scotland over Easter with the Liverpool Canoe Club who rented the whole of the Blackwater Hostel. This meant folks didn’t have to be strict about washing up the pots and pans within seconds of using them for fear of pissing off the other guests.

By arriving early (having kipped in the woods near Lockerbie), there was time to walk up the the reservoir without a map (a map would have told us that it was too far to go). It took five hours in my normal shoes and I was cross and knackered by the end of it.

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Monday, March 31st, 2014 at 8:21 am - - Kayak Dive

Not quite such successful conditions as when we dived under LLandudno Pier the first time. This time we were attempting to take a couple of strangers who wanted to get into kayak diving on the first available day with reasonable conditions since September last year. (It’s not been a good year for weather.)

There was a brisk easterly wind, and the waves were stirred up. It was somewhat bouncy under the pier. Even this far from the shore the water was still the consistency of weak tea (with milk). But I got the anchor in. Then, just as we were in the water with waves crashing past our ears, three guys in safety gear and orange jump suits stuck their heads out from above, and shouted. “Hey, what are you doing? You’ve not got permission. This is private property.”

They began shinnying down through the barnacle and mussel encrusted iron work.
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Saturday, November 30th, 2013 at 1:58 pm - - Kayak Dive 1 Comment »

There was a brief window of weather this week which was enough for three divers to get out on Cosmo’s boat on Thursday: Becka, me and someone much more competent than us with a rebreather from Ormskirk.

Although the sea was very calm, the visibility didn’t look good at an inshore site, so we moved off to the Wreck of the Counsellor in deeper water, and dived that.

It was black as midnight down there with barely 0.75m working visibility, so we came up pretty swiftly. Don’t waste risk; only do something dangerous if you’re getting something out of it.

My second tank was only a 10Litre, because my 12Litre was completely empty when I fetched it from the garage. Maybe something leaked. Fortunately this was meant to be a shallower dive, on the Wreck of the Speke, which, I was told, is on its side half buried in the sediment so you can go into its hold along the sea bed.

The anchor must have landed square in front of this opening, because we blundered away from it for quite some distance before we hit the wreck — from the inside!

Not good. According to the video footage, we were lost for 3 minutes, which is a very long time. While we got away with it, our margin for error was down to the width of a prawn’s antenna, because all it would take is a regulator snagged from your mouth by a bit of twisted metal or a exploding o-ring, and then we’d be toast.

There was a dredger at work on the channel, which might have accounted for the visibility.

Back in the harbour all the little boats piled into the lock following the usual delay waiting for tide to rise high enough to be over the sill. Everyone else had been out in the estuary fishing for cod. Becka challenged me to a game of “spot the female”. Not a single one among them. What is it about fishing and women?

Anyhow, that was enough excitement for one week.

Monday, October 28th, 2013 at 10:53 am - - Kayak Dive, Weekends

So that was the usual HSMWorks Denmark run over with. We’d stayed for a week from Thursday to Thursday, across the weekend when not much was going on as there used to be because people now have lives to go to. We got one meal out (manager not allowed to come because he can’t self-authorize), but otherwise had to fend for ourselves.

I played two games of Underwater Rugby with the Amager club which damn near killed me. The first session was on the Thursday we arrived and I almost threw-up during the pre-game training.

I can hold my breath, or I can swim around frantically, but I can’t do both. When it’s time to breath and you are at the bottom of a three metre pool it’s bad. You don’t get that problem with underwater hockey, where the game is more to do with being in the right position and flicking the puck from place to place. I gave up trying to keep up.

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Friday, August 30th, 2013 at 6:31 pm - - Hang-glide, Kayak Dive

This was the formerly unlisted video of my crash down on the Gyrn in Wales which made me feel quite sorry for myself with my total lack of competence and ability to have a good time with this sport (skip to 2min 30).

Then I went to Austria and life was great, particularly at Greifenburg.

Things weren’t so bad back at Loser either, with a series of take-offs and landings that I loved — all of them.

Back home in Liverpool I wanted to fly some more, but haven’t had the chance. Got offered a dive trip out to Liverpool Bay yesterday, and persuaded Becka to come.

Pretty murky all told, but did the job of dropping us into a thoroughly different universe where we happily swam with the fishes in the dark until the air ran out.

What more could you ask for out of an experience?

Thursday, June 13th, 2013 at 8:03 pm - - Kayak Dive

Half way through June and it feels like I’ve already blown this summer. Got to get busy.

On Saturday the 1st of June in the afternoon, I did a kayak dive on the SS Editor (wrecked in 1887) on tide rip rock at Penrhyn Mawr where the sea kayaks like to play. A bunch of them came through while I was thinking about diving, and I should have filmed them for context. Otherwise, it’s a more watchable vid than most and could be popular with those paddlers curious about what’s on the sea bed.

For me, this dive was a collector’s item. I hadn’t expected to kayak dive such an extreme place, but the psychological boat cover from our club diving the Missouri nearby gave me the impetus to go for it. Odd to note, my quivering fear of these actions seems to have vanished and I just got on with it. I don’t know why.

On Sunday 2nd of June a cave diver friend came out to Anglesey for a dive, having spent all Friday night in Large Pot on a trip where they grabbed 400m of new cave passage without surveying it. This was extremely rude and thoughtless, but we forgave him. Sea conditions were ideal, and we headed over to the wreck of the Hermine. I couldn’t recharge the gopro, so there’s no movie of the dive in which every living sea creature was encountered in its proper place, from the conger in its hole, to the crayfish on a ledge as though in an aquarium. Becka played surface cover in a boring sea kayak. We took a second dive out to 20m from the Hermine (having juggled diving bottles between us) hoping for a drift dive, but there was no current. There were, however, scallops. And that was the weekend, where I got 5 dives and Becka only got 2, but our visitor got 2 as well so it wasn’t completely wasted.

Becka spent the whole of the week agonizing over the extensions in Large Pot and couldn’t wait to get me underground at the weekend on Saturday 8 June when we would survey all the passages the first explorers had trampled through, but not drawn up. Her plan was that we would go down on two consecutive days because there was too much to survey in one trip. I knew this was implausible because (a) the length of the new discoveries was grossly over-estimated, and (b) I become very grumpy when I do more than 6 hours of caving per week — particularly in a very grubby wetsuit that needs to be patched after every trip. The mud in one of the crawls was exactly like Philadelphia cream cheeze — soft and very sticky. You won’t forget it. Hopefully the passage of lots of visitors will eventually smear it out of the way so it becomes a dim distant bad memory.

There’s not a lot of point taking a gopro underground in big passage, even with the brightest light I have. The Olympus camera that would have worked is terminally broken again after being taken on its second trip. This video shows us putting down conservation tape into the fresh passage so that cavers can keep to one well trampled path and avoid trashing 100% of the cave floor with their muddy boots.

On Sunday we stomped around the hillside looking for evidence of our discoveries on the surface (eg where this huge tunnel would have intersected with the valley) but drew a blank. Then stomped up Whernside looking for a place I could potentially fly my glider sometime when there is an east wind and I have energy for an insane carry up.

Finally, on Monday, I did actually fly my glider with almost disastrous style. I’m not pleased with it, so here is a link to the unlisted YouTube video. Fasten your seatbelts. It rapidly turns sheep shaped.

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013 at 6:48 am - - Kayak Dive

Stunning weather. Astonishing visibility. We had the guts to go beyond the scary Penryn Mawr into the sheltered coves beyond and dive the wreck of the Kyle Firth just beyond.

This wreck is right about here:

View Larger Map
More vids to follow.

Monday, May 20th, 2013 at 7:46 pm - - Kayak Dive

This is paddling back along Loch Carron from Plockton to our lovely hostel in Stromeferry with a 20mph tailwind on Monday 13 May.

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Friday, April 26th, 2013 at 12:35 pm - - Kayak Dive

An excellent 3 days across and then underwater care of Aquaholics. The ferry departed at 10:30pm from about 5 miles away from our house, and the drive from Belfast to Ballycastle the next morning took under an hour, and then we were on the water.

The weather was excellent (after a week of dire forcast warnings so bad that we expected to get seasick on the crossing), but the viz was awful, even on the North Wall of Rathlin Island with its dropoff of 200m and where normal viz is 20 metres (it was about 3m for us).

Maybe its all that crap from the oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago that’s finally worked its way up on the Gulf Stream. Not that there was much gulf stream in evidence as the water temperature was consistently 7 degrees C — a temperature not usually reached except on a few days in February. Something’s wrong.

But we had a great time. You can see me smiling underwater. I’ll be going again.

Sunday, April 14th, 2013 at 1:37 am - - Kayak Dive

Have just finished a quick edit of the fun and games underwater with other divers and SMBs (surface marker buoys) on the Cornwall trip. I’m keeping up with the rate of new footage.

Last week I went into town to buy myself a logbook. I have been very slack for many years by not keeping a diving logbook. And I haven’t required a hang gliding logbook obviously, though that went AWOL towards the tail end of my activities. And it’s eccentric to keep a personal caving logbook, though there are usually club and expedition ones.

I thought maybe I’d do it if I made a combined one of everything. For a period I wrongly believed that the blog was sufficient. But the logbook records the names of who you went with, something that does not belong on the internet. So hopefully I’ll be able to keep it up this time. And continue to do stuff that requires logging.