Like diving in a big aquarium

The water can be a little milky, and there hasn’t been much sun to brighten things up, but nonetheless Malcolm was heard to comment ‘it’s like diving in a big aquarium’. The water temperature is between 21 and 25 degrees depending on whose dive computer you believe, and exactly where we are diving.

Today is our 9th day of diving, and most people have done about 14 dives. The deepest dives we’ve done are 30 metres, but we are generally shallower than that.

We are being conservative in our dive times, as we are very safety conscious and aware that we are a long way from the nearest decompression chamber. The currents can be very strong at times, depending again on where we are and what the state of the tide is.

Some of us are diving in wet suits and others in dry suits. The Braveheart has three small tenders (inflatable boats with rigid hulls), and we use these to get to and from diving sites, and to dive from (we put our gear on in the boat, and then do a backward roll into the water). The boat crew drive the tenders, and stay at the dive site, ready to pick up divers as soon as they come to the surface.

We usually do two dives a day, one in the morning and another in the afternoon, and the average length of a dive is about 40 minutes.

We don’t have any underwater communications system, apart from the usual hand signals, so a good briefing before the dive is important so that every diver understands what the dive plan is. For safety we always dive in buddy pairs, and make sure we stay in touch underwater.

We did one dive in Denham Bay yesterday, and there was no sign of the mysterious island that apparently appears and then disappears again. But then again, we couldn’t actually see anything – we were diving over a sandy bottom that was getting stirred up by the swell coming in, so it was our only dive with visibility down to about 3 metres.

Needless to say, we didn’t do a second dive there!