Diving 2012

Diving

     

Photoalbum Dry Suit Dive

 

Sunday January 22, 2012: Practice diving with dry suit: a marvellous feeling

On Saturday January 15 Timo has bought a new dry suit. New, better would be to say his first one. Andy den Boer recently started to sell dry suits of O’Three. The brand is not really known on the Belgian market, but a few buddies already know it. Some of our buddies have bought it and started diving with it and are very satisfied of the dry suits. Until now the service offered by Andy and O’Three is very good. After the sale and the handover of the suit Timo has received a lot of useful information about maintenance and usage and other things: a top level service! In addition Andy has suggested to provide a short introduction to dry suit diving free of charge if that is not great, I don’t know! Andy, thank you for doing that! The meeting point was the ‘Put van Ekeren’, a lake close to Antwerp at ten AM Sunday morning. GPS (SAT NAV) directions for that is Ekersedijk, 2030 Antwerp and it will take you right there. Timo arrives there a bit before ten and there are already some ‘Passioned Divers’. Timo says hello to everybody: Frans, Dirk, Andy, Ivan, Francis, Nele and Ives (the last two will not be diving today, but come by to say hi). A bit later also Pascal joins us and we can start to prepare our gear. Earlier this week Timo had assembled everything, tried on the dry suit and thinks now it would have been a nice sight in his living room. He connected the inflator system and went through the chapter of dry suit diving from his Advanced Open Water Diver course. That won’t hurt.

Apart from the dry suit O’Three also provides a nice bag and a mat to get dressed, super. With the undersuit you feel warm, your feet are also not cooling down thanks to the mat and then everybody starts to get into the dry suit. For most divers this is not a problem, because they’ve already done a couple of dives, but Timo needs to adjust a bit. He manages well and does not need any assistance, except to close the zipper on his back. He’s not agile enough to do it himself. Therefore a front zipper would be better, but there will be little or no instances when Timo dives solo, so that won’t be a problem. Everybody is ready, except for Francis: he has some trouble with his fins, s we wait a bit and a couple of minutes later we walk to the stairs to start the dive. Timo has a healthy nervousness to try out his dry suit for the first time. Quickly wet the mask, use natural anti-fog-systems and then clean it off again. He was a bit reluctant to get in the cold water, but he’s wearing a dry suit and then you don’t feel the five degrees Celsius. Yes, this was a first happy moment. He puts his fins on and descends slowly into the cold water. Does it feel cold? No, of course not, everything is sealed perfectly and not a single drop enters in the  dry suit. The only thing that feels a bit cold are the hands and the head, but Timo has thick winter diving gloves and a new O’Three hood, so that’s fine. Get used to the cold and then go down.

Wow, this is going nice and easy. Yeah, right, you think it is. Timo carries eight and a half kilo and can descend, but one kilo extra would not hurt in the beginning. Remember this for the next dive. He goes down with head first, damn, all the air in his boots and there he is, feet up in a dry suit. With some strange manoeuvres he manages to get upright again. The next attempt is calmer and he can dive with feet first. So far so good. After ten minutes the others are also ready to start the dive and we leave. Timo checks his buoyancy (just like an OWD) and Andy checks things out, but the thing is to be under control of the buoyancy, just like in the beginning and this requires some adaptation. We dive with Andy, Dirk and Francis. There is not really a lot to see the first ten minutes, but then we reach the deep part. Through a small canyon-like trench and we dive down. Timo gets rid of the squeeze by adding some air to the dry suit and then we keep buoyancy on the suit and not on the BCD. As he was used to Timo uses his BCD, but Andy was paying attention and said ot to use the BCD, but rather the suit – we should think of a name change for the BCD then. We follow the wall and reach a depth of about seventeen meters. We look around and Timo notices he has quite some air in his suit already. Every descending meter the air is compressed and there is a little squeeze, so add some air and don’t forget to deflate with the left arm when you go up again. And also that works out fine for the first time. Great! Frans is filming under water (see embedded flash) and we love this dive very much. We see some statues: a small hammerhead, the piranha, a dressed diver, but when it comes to underwater life, there’s not a lot to see at this time of the year. We do spot a small bass of about ten centimetres.

We’re under the water for half an hour and we stay at about eight meters, then we go a bit shallower and then we need to keep our buoyancy in mind, deflate on time. It almost seems like Timo has done this all his life. When you’re feeling good, it’s OK to brag a little bit. Timo is aware though that he still has a lot to learn. After three quarters of an hour nobody is cold, but Andy decides to turn to the shore again. And that is what Timo is afraid of. The shallow parts could cause the dry suit to pull him up. But if you let the air out on time everything is all right. And so he does. Super! A dive of fifty minutes in five degrees, a really great moment.  In the past he has given some comments that dry suit divers are not hard core, but he is already starting to become one himself. A quote of Confucius (Chinese philosopher): “Only the wisest and the stupidest of men never change.” The great thing of a dry suit is that you’re not cold. Timo would have thought his hands and head would be colder, but in the end this is OK. Almost an hour in cold water and still come out of the water warm and dry, that is really great? We then walk back to the parking lot and change clothes and then we celebrate the first dry suit dive with some champagne and a small taste of whiskey. We chat about this dive and about the upcoming diving vacation and enjoy the good moments. A couple go home, but the hard core (Timo, Andy, Frans, Ivan and Mark – who stopped by later) have a drink at restaurant Triton. There we chat some more and have a drink and after a while it’s time to go home; the day started dark and cloudy, but now the sun is shining and it is just great. Timo has finished his first dive with a dry suit and he has loved the dive, the company and the drinks.

 

Thanks buddies!