In lieu of a log entry I thought I'd log this dive here..... As some of you know, the weather in Holland is really crappy and this boy is going stir-crazy waiting for spring to arrive so diving is a means of survival more than a hobby at the moment.......so here we go.
The drive out took quite a while. I needed to pick up my divebuddy at the diveshop which is ordinarily a 10 min drive. Instead the drive to the shop took me 30 min because all of the roads in town were covered in ice and I got stuck in traffic.
But I was determined to have fun and not let that get to me. I had some good music in the car (an album from Erykah Badu) and I just turned it up and kept thinking about how nice it was going to feel to be in the water.
Once at the shop I bumped into another buddy of mine who I'll be diving with in June. We're going to Belgium to make the rounds of their excellent quarry diving (this is in fact not a joke -- we go every year for a long weekend) and do some tek nitrox dives; it's kind of the geek divers' version of a pub-crawl....
. He wants me to go to Egypt with him in April too but I'm not sure I can leave my project unattended for a week in April. I have all kinds of board meetings lined up in the next 3 weeks and I expect a lot of lobby work to fall out of that. I'm also going to Turkey in May so to leave in April and in May might be a lot for my client to accept.... The hazard of my day job is that I run big projects and while I might look like the boss to everyone around me I can get to feeling like the project has a life of it's own and it allows me to play along if I want....
Anyway, moving along. We took of on the freeway in the direction of the divesite. Slack tide was at 21:00 and ordinarily we would have been on time to dive any site we wanted. However with the bad weather we weren't making much headway so we decided to dive a site that doesn't get much current. Its neaps today and high tide so we were still looking good on paper.
Once we got to the site we checked out conditions. The tide was the highest I've ever seen at this location and the wind was force 4, less than we were expecting considering the weather. It was coming from the west while the tide was moving to the west so the surface currents were bound to reduce the tidal current in the first 5 metres or so. Good news for the safety stop. We both have a good eye for these kinds of conditions and without too much discussion we made the judgment that the current should be negligible for most of the dive so we made a plan to enter at a certain point downstream, drop off to about 27 metres (90ft) and swim west to exit at another point further up. At this point it was pitch black and we had the whole ocean entirely to ourselves.....
The air temperature had warmed up to a couple of degrees under the freeze point and so we got geared up and in the water. The water temp was about 1C (34F) and it always takes a couple of minutes for the feeling that someone is driving a nail into your forehead to subside..... Once we were ready we took off ... down down down. at around 18 metres (60ft) we hit a little band of bad viz but it cleared up under 22 metres (70+ft). The oyster beds at this site continue almost all the way down to the bottom at around 30 metres and after that it's sand/mud and there isn't much to see. We continued going down to 27 metres (90ft) and turned west.
We moved on like this, side by side, frog kicking and looking in between the oysters for signs of life in this frozen ocean. Most of the fish were reluctant to move and we were easily able to stoke them gently with an extended finger. The crabs were dormant, in dire need of warmth but alive and we saw a big lobster with it's tail tucked under it's belly in what seemed like a vain attempt to trap what little body heat it may have to spare. A lone "Trisopterus lucus" (a fish the Dutch call a Steenbolk -- in English a Pouting) added what little colour could be found beyond the browns and greens of the oyster fields. It looked out of place to me. It was clearly a juvenile at 10cm or so and a bit of a rarity in the costal inlets. On the North Sea you see them in large numbers and much larger. I thought it must be lost.
It never ceases to amaze me, in fact, to see the life in the Oosterschelde (that's the body of water we were diving in) in the winter. Any old fish can survive in the tropics but these fish.....these fish *define* tough. They are the icons of natural selection that put the punctuation in Darwin's theory. They are lovely, resilient creatures living in one of the coldest oceans on the planet.....and thriving.
So....what goes down must come up and it was our time to come up. We moved from 27 to 22 metres just as a huge canal-boat passed overhead. Big ones are common at this site during the day but not at night. They are in any event a powerful reminder of the fate that awaits the diver foolish or suicidal enough to ascend in their path. We hugged the bottom and continued our ascent as the rumbling of the mechanical monster above us literally caused our fins to vibrate to it's powerful resonance. I often wonder if they can see the divers on their depth finders.
At 18 metres (60ft) the bottom flattens out a little which slowed our ascent at just the right time. 3 minutes later we were at 13 metres and then 10, 8 and 6. Right on schedule. At this point in the dive the current picks up a lot as the millions of litres of water try to pass a point that juts out into the shipping lane. It seems to work like an airplane wing standing on it's side and it's a very recognizable point for navigation because of the sudden heavy current. Although you have to work hard to get past it, you also welcome seeing it because it means you are exactly where you thought you were and no where else.
A few minutes later we were past the point and out of the current again swimming at 6 metres. Another 5 or 6 minutes later we encountered what is ordinarily the path leading to the water but as I said before the tide was unusually high (about 1/2 meter higher than the highest tide I can recall) and we encountered the path to the exit under water. A quick sign to each other. Yes, we'll exit here. We swam up the path and came out at the exit point with millimetre precision. A perfect end to a very relaxing dive.
R..
The drive out took quite a while. I needed to pick up my divebuddy at the diveshop which is ordinarily a 10 min drive. Instead the drive to the shop took me 30 min because all of the roads in town were covered in ice and I got stuck in traffic.
But I was determined to have fun and not let that get to me. I had some good music in the car (an album from Erykah Badu) and I just turned it up and kept thinking about how nice it was going to feel to be in the water.
Once at the shop I bumped into another buddy of mine who I'll be diving with in June. We're going to Belgium to make the rounds of their excellent quarry diving (this is in fact not a joke -- we go every year for a long weekend) and do some tek nitrox dives; it's kind of the geek divers' version of a pub-crawl....
. He wants me to go to Egypt with him in April too but I'm not sure I can leave my project unattended for a week in April. I have all kinds of board meetings lined up in the next 3 weeks and I expect a lot of lobby work to fall out of that. I'm also going to Turkey in May so to leave in April and in May might be a lot for my client to accept.... The hazard of my day job is that I run big projects and while I might look like the boss to everyone around me I can get to feeling like the project has a life of it's own and it allows me to play along if I want.... Anyway, moving along. We took of on the freeway in the direction of the divesite. Slack tide was at 21:00 and ordinarily we would have been on time to dive any site we wanted. However with the bad weather we weren't making much headway so we decided to dive a site that doesn't get much current. Its neaps today and high tide so we were still looking good on paper.
Once we got to the site we checked out conditions. The tide was the highest I've ever seen at this location and the wind was force 4, less than we were expecting considering the weather. It was coming from the west while the tide was moving to the west so the surface currents were bound to reduce the tidal current in the first 5 metres or so. Good news for the safety stop. We both have a good eye for these kinds of conditions and without too much discussion we made the judgment that the current should be negligible for most of the dive so we made a plan to enter at a certain point downstream, drop off to about 27 metres (90ft) and swim west to exit at another point further up. At this point it was pitch black and we had the whole ocean entirely to ourselves.....
The air temperature had warmed up to a couple of degrees under the freeze point and so we got geared up and in the water. The water temp was about 1C (34F) and it always takes a couple of minutes for the feeling that someone is driving a nail into your forehead to subside.....
Once we were ready we took off ... down down down. at around 18 metres (60ft) we hit a little band of bad viz but it cleared up under 22 metres (70+ft). The oyster beds at this site continue almost all the way down to the bottom at around 30 metres and after that it's sand/mud and there isn't much to see. We continued going down to 27 metres (90ft) and turned west. We moved on like this, side by side, frog kicking and looking in between the oysters for signs of life in this frozen ocean. Most of the fish were reluctant to move and we were easily able to stoke them gently with an extended finger. The crabs were dormant, in dire need of warmth but alive and we saw a big lobster with it's tail tucked under it's belly in what seemed like a vain attempt to trap what little body heat it may have to spare. A lone "Trisopterus lucus" (a fish the Dutch call a Steenbolk -- in English a Pouting) added what little colour could be found beyond the browns and greens of the oyster fields. It looked out of place to me. It was clearly a juvenile at 10cm or so and a bit of a rarity in the costal inlets. On the North Sea you see them in large numbers and much larger. I thought it must be lost.
It never ceases to amaze me, in fact, to see the life in the Oosterschelde (that's the body of water we were diving in) in the winter. Any old fish can survive in the tropics but these fish.....these fish *define* tough. They are the icons of natural selection that put the punctuation in Darwin's theory. They are lovely, resilient creatures living in one of the coldest oceans on the planet.....and thriving.
So....what goes down must come up and it was our time to come up. We moved from 27 to 22 metres just as a huge canal-boat passed overhead. Big ones are common at this site during the day but not at night. They are in any event a powerful reminder of the fate that awaits the diver foolish or suicidal enough to ascend in their path. We hugged the bottom and continued our ascent as the rumbling of the mechanical monster above us literally caused our fins to vibrate to it's powerful resonance. I often wonder if they can see the divers on their depth finders.
At 18 metres (60ft) the bottom flattens out a little which slowed our ascent at just the right time. 3 minutes later we were at 13 metres and then 10, 8 and 6. Right on schedule. At this point in the dive the current picks up a lot as the millions of litres of water try to pass a point that juts out into the shipping lane. It seems to work like an airplane wing standing on it's side and it's a very recognizable point for navigation because of the sudden heavy current. Although you have to work hard to get past it, you also welcome seeing it because it means you are exactly where you thought you were and no where else.
A few minutes later we were past the point and out of the current again swimming at 6 metres. Another 5 or 6 minutes later we encountered what is ordinarily the path leading to the water but as I said before the tide was unusually high (about 1/2 meter higher than the highest tide I can recall) and we encountered the path to the exit under water. A quick sign to each other. Yes, we'll exit here. We swam up the path and came out at the exit point with millimetre precision. A perfect end to a very relaxing dive.
R..
