Whytecliff Park – The Cut 29/11/2009

After the boat dive just the day before, I didn't think I'd be diving again on Sunday, but it worked out. Mihai and I decided to go do the Cut at Whytecliff park, and finish off the day with a skills-dive in preparation for some time in the water with Alan to work on more stuff. The skills-dive was to go over the basic 5 GUE scuba skills, which really is just air-sharing and mask-removal stuff. It's good stuff to practice though, since the more comfortable you are with it, the better you'll be when you need to do it for real. Alan offered to do a skills-dive with us, and wanted to make sure that everyone involved would be at a similar level before doing it.

Sunday turned out to be a pretty nice day. Overcast, but not rainy. It was kind of cold though, and a bit windy. We got to the park later than usual since we had to go by the shop to get some cylinder fills. All my cylinders were empty!

Mihai had brought his wife Christina along, and we walked down to the Cut entry point to check things out. The tide was supposed to be coming in at that time, and things looked not too bad. However, we'd soon see that there was some pretty wicked current happening!

Mihai hadn't done the Cut before, so I was going to lead. We geared up, did our checks, and started down. We were going to go to the right along the wall, and return at our agreed turn air-pressure. Pretty straightforward. Once we started along, I noticed that we were being pushed along quite well by a current. It was a fairly nice relaxing drift dive with it. At the back of my mind, though, I was thinking about the return swim against it, and how hard it might be. We continued along the wall for quite a while at about 20 metres, until we got to our agreed return air-pressure. I turned the dive at that point, and we started back. That's when the current really started to become a problem. With the extra effort, I went through my air a lot faster. I realized then that I should have turned the dive earlier, but everything was still good. I also should have come up to a shallower depth which would have helped air consumption, but I forgot. Anyway, I reached what I thought was the exit point, and signalled our ascent. We started to go up, and Mihai had a problem on the safety stop and continued up to the surface without being able to stop. I stayed down and waited out the safety stop, but didn't realize that while I was down that the current was pulling me north away from the exit point. When I did surface, I was a surprising distance away from Mihai. I also realized that I mistook the exit point, and it was actually a lot farther on, so that we had an even farther distance to go. I gave an ok signal to Mihai, and I saw him make one back, so I thought everything was good. I didn't realize that he didn't see my ok and started to swim back to me in case there was a problem. When Mihai and I met back up, we were quite far from the exit point. We started the long swim back along the surface next to the rocks, because we'd have to pull ourselves along from time to time because the current was so strong. I had enough air to do some of the trip under water, but that didn't really help in terms of effort. Eventually, we made it back just via brute force, which was the only option. We were pretty tired.

In the end, it was a lot of little things that combined into a bigger situation. There was no real problem, but it was a good learning experience. I'll certainly not forget the lessons learned. Every dive I go on I learn something new. This was a good one in terms of learning!

Needless to say, I was game for dive two, but we decided to pack it in for that day. No skills dive today. But, something was learned anyway.