Friday 22 October 2010

London Dive Chamber

Well a few of us made it to the London Dive Chamber last night to complete a 40m dry dive, however after a couple of people not turning up this all changed to a 50m dive. Got to say thanks to the guys that didn't turn up the rest of us enjoyed it even more.

Having never been in a hyperbaric chamber before I thought it would be a good idea to go have a look at one, the good people of the London Diving Chamber http://londondivingchamber.co.uk/ offer this for a small fee



Anyway on the list was Lindsey, Chantelle, Angela, Elwyn, Vicki and myelf(Paul). We paid our money and got changed into our jim jams ready to get into the chamber. We was asked to complete a simple test on the surface which would be repeated at 50m to check how we was effected by narcosis. After a briefing about the chamber and also about the dive, we all climbed inside and the doors was shut behind us.


Even though this wasn't a real dive with regards to kitting up and getting wet this was going to be a first for alot of the group including myself down to 50m.
As we started to descend the chamber started tp warm up and we was soon at 15m we had a quick check to make sure that everyone was OK and then it was down even deeper we was soon at 30m , and then it started Chantelle couldn't controll her laughing so we worked out that she was NARKED already and we was only just over half way down. We soon was at 40m and onwards to 50m. After about 5minutes we was down at 50m, we was given a sheet of paper which had some wording on in a set time we had to circle as many L's as possible.

Well this sent certain people over the edge, like Vicki's pen not working at 50m. We started to ascend with the first stop at 12m for 2 minutes then 9m for 6 minutes, followed by 6m for 28 minutes.

After getting to the surface we all completed our logbooks and checked our dive computers mine read 50.2m.

Result for the narcosis test well I scored 25 on the surface and 25 on the bottom.

PADi Night Diver Speciality Instructur course

Last night completed the PADi Night Diver Speciality Instructur course at Holborough Lake, near Snodland Kent. The tempature was dropping rether quickly with the clear sky's I'd say it was down to 5-6 degrees by 7.00pm.

Ryby(http://www.blueoceandiving.co.uk/) our course director went through all the explaination of what needs to be achived by the students over the 3 dives. This included signals, talking about torches and also how to prepare for the night dive. e all kitted up and headed into the water, it was warmer in the water than out.

It had been aggreed that we would do 2 dives tonight with a short surface interval then onto dive 2. We all descended down to an 8m platform.



Dive 1: This dive was more of a navigation dive around the objects in the lake this was with the torches on the visability was upto 10m and the perch and the small pike were out looking for food

Dive2: We descended back to the platform then one by one we switched our torches out waited around 30-40 seconds for our eyes to adjust to the light, then Ryby led the way as we all went off for a swim with the torches off. even though we had no lights it was amazing how much you can see with very little light, we all managed to get back to the platform.

Well that was another PADi speciality Instructor course completed so onto Enriched Air next.

Tuesday 5 October 2010