Julie's Boggle

Unlike last year, we skipped most of the club dives to the south coast this year, saving our diving budget for the more unusual club dive locations and our Red Sea excursion.

The most recent Weymouth trip was the exception because we’d never been on Skin-Deep before. Skin-Deep is a rather slick catamaran that has all the necessary pre-requisites to make her a great dive boat.

Of course we were just itching to try out our new camera underwater again, and we were not disappointed. This time we had the advantages of our experience from Anglesey, as well as better conditions — limited current and reasonable visibility — and patient buddies! As a result, a much higher proportion of our photos came out sharply focussed and with reasonably interesting subjects!

Tom created this funky collage for me (click on it to see a larger version)

In order to cater for people with a variety of bandwidth needs, I put the rest of the “best of” up as a Flickr album, so just click on the link to view them. (And don’t miss the little Zoom button above the photos on Flickr to see them at full size. )

Far too early on a lovely Sunday morning we joined the hordes of divers crowding into the under-sized carpark at Wraysbury Dive Centre – “London’s premiere [only] inland dive site”.

Literally, the single thing to recommend this particular site is its location – within spitting distance of London’s M25 ring-road. Everything else about it is decidely under-par (complete with cringe-worthy porta-loos) — except the scenery. And that doesn’t really count when you’re under water…

The location was what made it the site of choice for our second-to-last training dive. Our briefing that morning was to learn the basics of compass navigation. And the man on hand to cover it with us was our helpful instructor Dave, gallantly giving up his Sunday morning to get us one step further on our Sports Diver qualification.

For our particular training exercise, Wraysbury was an excellent site. Once under the water, the visibility was about 2m at best, so getting the compass readings right was really the only way we were ever going to find our way to the next buoy.

Fortunately we managed to find our way most of the time and Dave was happy to sign us off after about an hour or so of finning around in the upper layers of murk. Then it was time to pack all our stuff away again, get the cylinders filled, and find some lunch!

It didn’t take much imagination to think of a nearby pub that would cater to our needs. Our old favourite, The Royal Oak is also conveniently placed for access from Wraysbury.

Mmm, just what was needed to quench the killer thirst… These went down really well in the balmy heat of a late-summer’s afternoon together with an excellent steak and ale pie.

You have to admit that there are some things they do really well in this country!

One of the things we were both extra keen to rescue from storage in SA was our cappuccino machine. (Having done that, we are now in the position of waiting on the lovely people at Pickfords to actually put it all on a boat and send it over to us! )

Anyway, in anticipation of the cappuccino machine’s arrival, Tom thought it would be only right to have a decent coffee grinder ready and waiting for it. So he carefully checked out the many variations of grinders on the market, and picked himself an expensive Italian one for me to buy him for his birthday.

This one is a deluxe “burr-grinder” which is apparently far superior to the ordinary run-of-the-mill grinders… And it also has a funky little lever for measuring out the exact portion of coffee for one cup of espresso.

Of course it wouldn’t be much of a present without any beans to grind, so I headed over to our local Starbucks to check out their selection of DIY coffee accessories. It turned out that they do a great range of take-home goodies so the grinder was supplemented with caramel syrup, Starbucks coffee beans, and some very yummy stuff that they call Caramel Drizzle Syrup but which is more like barely-liquid toffee than anything else. Yum.

Although the grinder is still being used with the cafetiere for now, we’re getting really good use out of it. All round it’s turned out to be an excellent choice of birthday present, inspiring Tom to spoil us both with great coffee several times a week since then. Mmmm….

Gone are the days when we thought that most of the cars parked in London suburbs must be irrevocably “parked in”. Since becoming a London driver himself, Tom prides himself on being able to get our car both in and out of the notoriously tiny spaces in our neighbourhood.

The one he eased us into today seemed a particularly good example of the fine art of parallel parking…

Thankfully, the parellel parking spaces in the SA driving tests were a lot more generous than this or I would never have passed! (Not that Tom managed this one in the regulation three maneuvres! )

With memories of last year’s very tedious trip up to Wales (on a Friday afternoon) still surprisingly fresh, we took the whole of Friday off for getting there this year. Despite high hopes of an early start, we were only on the road by 11h00.  Six and a half hours later – far too many of them spent on the M6! :yawn: – we were in Anglesey.

In Wales (well, Anglesey at any rate) there’s a rather quaint system of giving all the houses names instead of numbers. This is all very well if you’re the local postie, who has every house down the street committed to memory, but much less convenient when you’re crawling along the street in a car wondering when your charmingly named B&B is going to show up.

Once again we were diving with Quest Diving, in Scott Waterman’s diver-friendly hard boat, Endeavour.

 Unlike last year’s sunny skies, we had looming grey clouds to contend with on the Saturday as we set out. But on the positive side, there was minimal wind and the water was a relatively warm 16°C.  Rather pleasant to leap into after spending long minutes wrestling with diving kit in a full wetsuit.

Our first dive of the weekend  was a pretty offshore wreck, the SS Mona. There wasn’t much of her left, but she was just bustling with crabs. And every inch of the framework above the sand was covered – literally – with fat white and orange plumose anemones.  Most of us came up with big slimy patches from accidentally getting a little too close to the wreck and popping the darn things.

On the second dive, the camera got its first proper open-water exposure (having taken just the water-proof case down on the first dive).  Tom was the photographer, and the important lesson we took away from this dive was that the macro setting is really necessary if you want to get anything approaching decent focus.
Fortunately at this level of resizing, you can’t see the blurring – much.

We had another civilised start on Sunday – 11h00. Luxury! Unfortunately, despite the patchy sun, the diving conditions were again extremely poor; mostly from the storm run-off from the week’s heavy rains.  Nevertheless, Tom managed to capture some of the best images of the weekend up close, despite the 1 – 2m visibility!

And his top macro shot of the weekend, was a tiny dahlia anemone, which out of all the photos that weekend, took the prize for clarity and focus! (Click the image to see the full-size version.)

In between dives, we got to spend some time in the sun, and got a good view of the seals off Seal Island.

On the final dive, I got the camera, but nothing really worthwhile came of it. (Focusing, in even a slight current, turns out to be harder than I thought!) And then, at the skipper’s recommendation, and democratically agreed by all on the boat, we decided not to dive on Monday because the forecast indicated nothing good would come of it.  (While it’s disappointing to lose a day’s diving, beating the long-weekend traffic back into London is a significant advantage!)

So that night we found the only restaurant in town that would take 11 people at 21h00 and without a booking – the Menai Tandoori  (yes, it was rather average); and the next day we got a nice early start on our trip back to London and clocked a smooth 5 hours door to door.  :grin: