Day 4 – Deep seas and walls
Tuesday, 23rd May 2006 by JulieWednesday:
The day started with a rather rude awakening when the boat engines rumbled to life, more than an hour before the bell. We were moving round to the other side of the two Gubal islands for our first dive of the day and even from our beds it felt like a wildly rocking trip.
Today’s first dive was the Rosalie Moller, a Scottish cargo ship working for the Royal Navy, sunk by German bombers in 1941. At 44m to the sea bed, the deepest parts of her were well below our certification range so we were going to have to be careful about how deep we let ourselves go.
Going down this was also the worst visibility of any of our Red Sea dives. We just had to follow the rough blue nylon rope down to the mast, but the wreck was hardly visible at all almost 20m.
Overall, it was interesting as being the deepest dive we’d ever been on by ourselves (to 33m) but that kept us entirely above deck so we didn’t see that much. With the darkness and the slightly cloudy water, this was far more like a UK dive than any we encountered that week.
Over breakfast, other divers who had explored inside were praising the quality of the wreck, and I think it’s safe to say that we missed out on rather a lot of that. The highlight for me was the swarms of tiny darting silver fish around the mast. Swirling a torch beam at them produced a really nifty optical effect.
After we’d eaten, we had another rolling trip back to Small Gubal. The weather wasn’t too pleasant out, so we relaxed in lounge area with lots of swaying and creaking, and occasional crashing, around us.
The next dive, as indicated by Malin’s excellent drawing (markerpen on whiteboard), was along a rather spectacular wall known as Bluff Point. And this time I was takiing a turn at being the leader of our buddy pair — something that has been known to put one in a tricky position in an environment where communication is extremely limited.
This was the first dive where the current was really noticeable as we dropped away from the Zodiacs and headed for the protection of the wall. Not far along we found the dark openings in the wall which could only be the caverns Steve had mentioned in the briefing. We swam into one of them and the view up to the top – several meters above us – where rays of sunlight pierced the dimness, reflecting off clouds of silvery glassfish, was awesome.
Other highlights included the biggest gorgonian sea-fan we’d seen so far – this thing was the size of a small tree, complete with realistic looking trunk, only entirely flat and a delicate pink all over.
We had the option of carrying on with the current around the wall to a bay where there would be Zodiacs waiting to pick us up – or we could swim back to the boat. I’d been inspired by another group that swam back all by themselves the day before, so around the halfway mark, by which time we were a fair bit shallower, I indicated that we were heading back the way we’d come.
This turned out to be a memorable swim against a very strong current. It was jolly hard work and I’m still not completely sure why I didn’t just turn us back around and let the current take us to the waiting transport. Tom was apparently thinking we weren’t going to make it all the way back, but we kept on and finally got round the last corner to where the boat was moored.
At that point, we paused to take in the sights, and I reflected that this was actually much nicer than all the heavy finning.
Just then, we had the pleasure of seeing a large Napoleon wrasse drifting through the water not far away from us. This chap was wonderfully comical. He was exactly as you would imagine an amusing animated fish should look. A solid 0.5m long body, which makes his fins look puny, great big thick lips, and these eyes that show their whites as they move. So we could see one of them rolling around as he cast a curious eye over us. What a fantastic character. 
The last stretch of getting to the boat turned out to be the hardest swim of all – really blasted our air consumption stats! But at least after that there was lunch to look forward to… and an opportunity for an warm afternoon’s nap out on deck. Mmm.
