No flippy floppies, but quite a bit of snow in the morning in Parksville.
I had to dig the car out of it!
It was snowing in Nanaimo, but nothing sticking as we met up at the Sea Dragon boat, and the 4 of us loaded up. Liz, Drew, David and myself.
Drew was using a set of doubles, and the rest of us were on single tanks for this trip. And David was doing his Wreck course with Liz.
We headed out first to the Saskatchewan, a nice large naval ship in around 80-100ft of water.
Kitting up, I noticed I had a small leak out of my SPG, in the 45 minute trip out, I lost 30Bar of gas (about 1/6 of a tank). Some quick recalculations of turn pressures and away we go!
Or so I thought. Drew, on the other hand, had a broken spring strap. The spring part of the spring strap. Having no duct tape, we used a bungee hooked to the fin around his ankle. Fin 1, Us 1.
Then we jumped in. I stayed in, Drew came out quickly to do his zipper ALL the way up.
Take 2.
We headed down the line to the bow. Looked at pressures, and carried on towards midship. We grabbed a few quick videos of the wreck class (part of our plan) as they headed back to the line to head up. Yup, we took that long to get in and down, that they were finishing up their dive and starting their ascent.
We only got to the first gun, barely anywhere near midship before I started getting to our turn pressure.
Bummer.
Up the line we go!
I was able to hold my stops, I felt a little too heads up on the ascent, but hanging on the line due to current, but not out of control.
We get on board, some debriefs, and on our way to the Riv Tow. an old war time tug boat.
This time, we hop into a 60-70ft dive, with full tanks. Drew hops in first, and breaks his mask strap. I sit back down as we hand him a spare one, then hop in and we head down for a nice leisurely dive around the boat.
We were recording our pressures to do some SCR homework, and on the first recording, it seems Drew punctured his glove. Going around the ship, taking video with the GoPro (last dive it turns out that I just took 2 pictures, one at the start, and one at the end of the dive, thinking I was in video mode).
Pretty good viz, quite a few stars (some quite huge), some cod, rock fish and a few different kind of crabs were hanging around on board.
We hit our time limits (well I did, being on Air and the rest on 32%) and we headed up.
It seemed the day was all about Drew, but it wasn’t, just his gear seemed to have a bad day with Murphy, luckily nothing too serious.
Stopped at a pub for some lunch, watching the videos and talk about the day, and then back home for the evening.
Nanaimo BC, HMCS Saskatchewan
Date: February 22, 2014
Bottom Time: 21 minutes
Max Depth: 29m
Water Temp: 6C
Vis: 6m
Notes: Lots of plumose anemones on wreck
Running Time: 44:58
Nanaimo BC, RivTow Lion
Date: February 22, 2014
Bottom Time: 29 minutes
Max Depth: 16m
Water Temp: 6C
Vis: 6m
Notes: Lots of crabs, took GoPro video
Running Time: 45:27