Dry Dive, But Not Bent

After a dive, assume any niggle is a bend unless medical advice says otherwise.

This is a difficult axiom to follow for most divers, including me. So 3 days after a dive, and there's still an ache and swelling of a toe, so what? Is it a bend?

A late-night battle between embarrassment, shame and fear of being a hypochondriac ends up in a phone call to the London Dive Chamber. Next day a dive doctor - none other than the irrepressible Jules Eden of SportDiver magazine - makes the assessment: "we--eeell - it could be, or it couldn't. There is conflicting evidence. So just to be sure we'll put you in the pot and see if it helps".

So bets are taken. If the pain subsides after oxygen at high-pressure, then it was a bend. If not, it wasn't. I'm hoping furiously, bitterly, to still be in pain at the end of four hours.

The excellent staff at the LDC include the man who sets me up with paperwork and blue clothes and the man who gets into the chamber/pot with me. Both ex-commercial divers, both rational, good men who make an insecure diver feel un-mocked for being unduly worried ("You did the sensible thing", one says. Now that's a loaded word - "sensible". Does it mean "totally, unutterably weak and beneath contempt"?)

Down to 18 metres, nice and slow. After each 20-minute O2 session the loudspeaker burbles a question; still no change - toe still red and hurts. Repeat.

3 sessions, no change, but carry on regardless - we're doing a "62 Table". This means 2 more hours, including:

* an ascent to 9 metres
* a full hour of O2, followed by another half-hour
* the slowest ascent from 9 metres to 0 metres in the history of diving (i.e. it took 30 minutes)
* the most god-awful straight-to-DVD action movie, starring the ever-worsening Wesley Snipes, and mockingly entitled 7 Seconds. It includes English actors putting on Romanian and Russian accents, and is a filmic crime worse than bestiality and murder. We were, however, a captive audience. At least the harsh sucking of the oxygen mask drowned out half the dialogue.

What the Doctor Did:

* skin sensitivity comparison on the two feet; one suspected of having bubbles, the other clear.
* reflex tests on knees and fore-arms; being particularly "pingy" is seen as an indicator of being bent. Unfortunately it turns out I'm essentially pingy, as evinced by the post-pressure-treatment reflex test.

Conclusion:

Not a bend. Get diving, sonny!

Top tips on better air consumption

Courtesy of Dive South Africa.

TR Thompson - a comedy in 3 parts

First time on the Thompson, and it's because the original dive was deemed to be a load of rusty shite. And by the slimy beard of Poseidon, the Inverclyde would have had to be a lot more than scattered metal hunks (which it's accused of being) to match the awesome muscular might of the TRThompson.

 

We were lucky with the viz and the water temperature, and I was lucky in a level-headed buddy, who:

 

1. disentangled my first stage from the shot-line; I was unwittingly trying to be the harpooned shark in Jaws, which managed to sound despite having several floating barrels nailed to it. In my case the two marker buoys were holding me up, and were it not for my buddy I'd have patiently duck-dived again and again until all 220bar x 15L of air had been expended. Whatever happened to "Stop, breathe, think, act"?

2. held onto my leg when my weight-belt came loose, just before we got to the safety stop.

 

In the interim, we flew over the vast artifacts that make up the wreck of this huge ship; swooshing down and touching was verboten, because this was high tide and that would have meant breaking the 30m skin that holds recreational divers in a safe bubble. So without really meaning to we did that anyway, and the dive computer shouts out "J'accuse!" with its max depth reading of 31m. There may also have been an accidental slippage into deco.

 

The usual throng of bib was scattered by the burly bashing of a dog-fish, whose appearance earned the wife in one buddy team a clout on the head from her husband, by way of alerting her to its arrival. She survived.

 

Apart from the ghostly green abandoned hangar effect of the gloomy wreckage, the visual highlight was a delayed surface marker buoy rocketing up from the deployment area, much like a party balloon released into the air. Its flapping tail and erratic path were symptomatic of a certain lack of drag - normally provided by the unspooling line. For yay! earning endless mockery to the end of her diving days, the DSMB's owner had failed to attach her reel to the buoy. The appearance of one more DSMB than there were dive teams confused the RIB skipper up top, but he recovered too.

 

Trite Pause for Thought: The TR Thompson was torpedoed by German youths in 1917 and her crew of 32 died with her. Now she's an adventure playground. Not sure how that makes me feel, but for sure respect and affection bubble to the surface of the emotion soup brewing in my belly. Thank you, TRT, and may all wrecks in future be intentionally scuttled with no loss of life.

2 x clodmoor SS

Dives 50 and 51 bring us two sightings of the famed propeller. You could snap off a screw blade and use it as a surf-board, easy; but first you;d have to chisel off the quadrillion mussels lining the surface. They're sitting there so thickly that a two-hands-wide spider crab can slip itself inside the gaps between their serried ranks.

 

This wreck is upside down, at least down by the stern, and the prop is the "money shot".  Finding it is a case of keeping the jagged, wall-like flank of the wreck to your right. The usual diveboat comments about not using a compass to find it apply - wrecks, metal, compass needles, etc. etc.

 

I briefly offered my torch handle to a young-ish lobster. It snapped and missed. A larger cousin later on simply declined and backed away.  One day I'd like to sit down by a lobster, turn my torch off and watch it for the full extent of my dive. This would make my buddy's dive less than exciting, to be sure.

 

What else did we see? Craploads of pouting in evasive clouds, easily dispelled by a torch-beam. One or two nosy pollack. And a mermaid taking a dump.

 

PS this wreck is also known as the Clodmore.