Tai Long Wan / Basalt Island

The Arctic Sea - 23 Feb 2003

In my experience diving in February has always been a silly thing to do, mainly because it's too cold for a warm-weather diver like me. Diving on 23 February was even sillier because the previous night we'd had Steve and Etsuko round for dinner. Since they were about to head off to Oz, Steve was busy emptying the contents of his drinks cabinet. What appeared to be an alcoholic windfall on Saturday night, wasn't looking like quite such a bonus at 8 o'clock on Sunday morning. I think my big mistake was the Indian Malt Whisky, which Steve had been assuring me all evening was actually "surprisingly good". After several bottles of wine and a very nice 1990 Port, I was incapable of telling if it compared favourably with its Scottish cousins, or whether it had more in common with drain cleaner. However it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The last thing I recall is Steve lifting Louisa high off the ground, and then dropping her. Hopefully next time I'll remember that laughing is not the appropriate response in those circumstances.

Somehow I made it to the boat on time (fortunately it was an Underwater Club junk so I had an extra half hour) and started re-hydrating myself as rapidly as possible. Dave Taylor had taken care of my tanks for me, although 2 tanks was looking a little excessive, in fact so was 1. Nigel Dearden and Bruce from Y-Dive were running a Practical Rescue Management course, so the day was punctuated by a series of scenarios, the first of which was when flushing water to the toilet failed.

We were going to do a first dive at the 2 islands in the middle of Tai Long Wan, and the visibility was good. Dave put his wetsuit on under his drysuit. This proved a sensible move - his drysuit contravenes the trades description act since it leaks like a sieve. I was on second flight, and as Paul put it, Carmen drew the short straw and got the job of looking after the dive leader. We made it back, so she must have done a good job. It was a pleasant dive, quite pretty, with a bicycle the only thing of real note that we saw (or that I remember). I only had a 4mm wetsuit, but I took comfort from the fact that Carmen's was only a 3mm. However that stopped being a comfort after half an hour as I started to realize how a brass monkey felt.

From there we moved to Basalt because the PRM people needed a beach. Proving that I still hadn't sobered up I volunteered to do a second dive, this time with Paul. I regretted it from the moment I got in. For some reason the water seemed even colder, and we dropped in on a boring, muddy bottom with low visibility. After 10 minutes we finally found a bit of reef to look at, and the dive got a lot better, but not warmer. The highlight was when we found 2 Fingered Dragonets. (I mean there were 2 of them, not that they were sticking up 2 fingers).

Well camouflaged Fingered Dragonet (Datylodpus dactylopus) (Keith Wilson, Trio, Port Shelter)

The dive turned into quite a good one and after 67 minutes I surfaced with severe frostbite and pneumonia. It's at times like these when you really don't want to hear how warm Paul's 6.5 mm semi-dry is.

Rob had a good day, getting 2 rescue assessments done with Brian. (Although I think he only passed the second one because Brian didn't want to be dragged up the beach again in his brand new, shiny semi-dry suit).

Apart from the miraculous recovery of the PRM course participants some of whom had been in a bad way with DCI, burst lungs, etc., the way back contained only one incident worthy of note. Paul gave me a beer out of his cool box, and after some thought I put it back, unopened. The highlight of the day had to be Nigel Dearden's impersonation of a rescue helicopter, which was amazingly lifelike. If Y-Dive ever get short of money they should rent him out at parties. And if the Government Flying Service finds their budget cut to solve the deficit problem, they might want to hire him to make it sound as though it's business as usual. On a cloudy day they'd probably get away with it. He was actually scrambled to deal Dave Taylor's badly broken arm, which he'd damaged when he slipped on the tanks. He had to slip several times before anyone noticed. Judging by the state of my BCD after he'd finished lying on it, if he ever needs a blood transfusion the hospital will have to send out for a family-sized jar of salsa. Apparently this was because we didn't have any tomato ketchup on board.

It was a good day out, but the uncontrollable shivering after the second dive was an unpleasant reminder of why I don't dive in February. In future, perhaps I should bring that Indian Malt Whisky along to warm myself up - it's "surprisingly good". If anyone's interested, I've got half a bottle left...