So I ordered the new car on Friday afternoon. I have decided not to go for the Audi A3 2.0T sportback (sob), but rather to satisfy myself with a black Polo GTI (1.8T with sunroof, leather seats, cruise control etc). Now i'm looking forward to driving this little tiger quite a lot cos i'm borrowing an 1100 at the moment and when i drive up a hill I might as well get out and push it.
Well, cars aside, I had another fun weekend (been out 7 nights in 3 weekends:P). A little tiger on thursday evening, followed by a lot of tiger on friday evening meant that on Saturday evening I took a chill pill as I had a dive to look forward to on Sunday.
Sunday's Dive
Well, on sunday, Whiskey and I headed off to Miller's point to dive the Smitswinkel Bay wrecks. Now there are 5 wrecks at this dive spot, all next to each other, scuttled by the navy in the 70's to form a dive site (well i'm sure they were going to scuttle them in any case.. but kind of them to think of us divers). We got all our gear ready and after a briefing waited for the skipper to return from a previous dive at the smitties wrecks. It soon became apparent that diving smitties was going to be out of the question. The skipper (a technical diver himself) informed us that visibility was at about 1 meter, and the surge was incredibly strong. Now just to put this into perspective, the dive boat finds the wrecks using echo location (sonar / depth sounder / what ever you would like to call it) and anchors on the wreck. The divers then descend on the anchor cable down to the wreck. When they got to the wreck, they could not see it just a few meters in front of them! They ended up clipping retractable lines to the anchor chain so they could find their way back!
Armed with this information, we packed the gear in the cars and headed off to A-Frame with our tails between our legs in search of a more diver friendly environment.
Once at A-Frame, it became apparent that we were going to have more success. The surge was still strong, and the water was murky, but we didn't care... we aren't your typical bunch of fair weather divers:D So with a EAN32 in our tanks (more oxygen than normal air - woohoo... nitrox!) we headed off to the water. The visibility was not the best I had seen... sitting at around 3 - 5 meters, and the surge was fairly strong. We swam to the cave, which is fun to swim through in surge as you get the whole super tube effect 4 meters under water:D
The Dive Briefing
Whiskey and I took up position behind the group (being master divers, the idea being that we would assist with any problems at the back of the group while the instructor leads). Upon entering the cave, one of the guppies decided to hold back and enjoy the view while the rest of the group headed off. When he realised that he was falling behind, darted off to the group and left whiskey and myself with no chance of finding the group. Not to worry though, even without a compass we navigated flawlessly around the reef, through caves (with one or two spy hops for a location) and gully's until we decided that our air supply (or Nitrox rather) was just enough to get us back without a 400m surface swim.
After a rather interesting swim back through the kelp in the surge (holding the kelp as the surge flows against you... then shooting forward at Mach 1 as it comes from behind!) we beached in style, dropped our gear and sat in the warm sun on the rocks only to watch our guppie surface without air a few hundred meters off shore. It was sweet payback watching the guppie swim hundreds of meters over kelp in cumbersome dive gear back to shore after holding us up in the cave:D
After changing (which is always an interesting experience on the side of the road) we headed off in search of beer at Dixies (a regular after dive watering hole), but alas it was full... so was the southern right. With our luck out here, we met up with some friends at Forries to demolish some beers and an awesome forries burger!
--Vodka
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