Playing with stages

Getting up in the morning and looking in the mirror confirmed what I thought. My worst hicky yet from my neck seal.

I was a damp drive down to Victoria, and I guess Dan overheard me talking the day before about wanting to take the TDI Solo Dive course, and brought along some extra AL40 stage tanks to play with on the dive at Willis Point.

We topped them up with air at the shop, some quick what to do, don’t do in regards to bottle management, deployment and stowing and we were off.

The past week or two, people had been reporting some bad vis for the first 5m at Willis, and they weren’t joking!

Above 3m was thick pea soup, and below it was perfectly clear, with tonnes of vis (almost Caribbean like). The soup was thick enough, I could barely read my bottom timer right in front of me!

We geared up, did the long walk down the fire access road, and hopped in. The plan was to go left along the wall, see what we can find in the appliance department and the sub at around 30m or so, then head up and back and play with the stages.

Dropping in, we immediately saw the tub and sub together at roughly 33m, headed along the wall, and after 12 minutes, we headed up back to the shallows ontop of the wall around 5-10m. The top was bustling with life. Lots of stars, cucumbers, countless number of small crabs flying out behind rocks and leaves with claws a ‘coming out’.

I figured, well, I’ve got a stage on me, might as well deploy it!

I pulled out the reg, verified the bottle, turned on the tank, take a breath, spit out my primary and go to shove the stage reg in.

Simple right?

Mostly, I had a few issues. When I clipped in the stage, I didn’t realize that I clipped the lower boltsnap through the hose loop, so when I went to pull it out, I couldn’t. When I purged the reg just before putting it in my mouth, I neglected to realize it has a very different mouth piece than what I’m used too (very small and narrow), and took a few seconds to actually have it secured. Well, if I get into the stage game, I’m thinking of having all the same mouth pieces would be beneficial.

I breathed the bottle down a bit, then swapped back to my primary, and stowed the stage. Then we started to swap bottles. We had 2 kinds of bottles, a Luxifer, and a Catalina. Both sit very differently in the water, and I didn’t like the Luxifer in how bottom’s up it was compared to the Catalina.

I called the dive just before the hour mark, as with the squeeze of my suit at 3m, my feet were frozen. We started to head back towards the bouy away from the dock we were near, and boom, up I head into the soup, and next thing I’m on the surface. It wasn’t much of a surface swim (just a house lot away).

Getting on land, I realized I felt a little damp inside my suit, and getting up to the car and taking it off verified it. I was soaked from my chest to my knees. I guess my inflator valve is a little loose on my suit.

We headed off for a lunch in West Saanich, and I made my way down to Ogden to check out if their shore dive was happening or not that night. From all assumption it was, so I raced off to Ron & Annettes to throw my undergarment into the dryer for a bit before headed back out to Ogden.

Getting back there, it turns out the wind shifted slightly and both sides of the breakwater were pretty rough, so no last dive of the trip for me 🙁
Brentwood Bay BC, Willis Point
Date: March 19, 2014
Bottom Time: 56 minutes
Max Depth: 33m
Water Temp: 7.2C
Vis: Pea soup above 3m, Excellent below
Running Time: 48:47

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