The saga of the drysuit looks as though it may have come to an end.  Hoo-flipping-ray!! And about time too.

By the end of last season it was leaking really badly, and I had two miserably cold days at the end of October, completely soaked by the end of each morning dive.  Luckily there was no afternoon dive on the Saturday and on Sunday there were the harbour's hot showers and a complete change of clothing to look forward to before the long drive home.

That was IT.  Enough.  I thought I was going to have to get a new suit and even got in touch with a friend who makes them (though only for power-boating - he wasn't too sure about making one for diving...).  I took the suit to the dive shop for a last attempt at rendering it usable.  Given that the shop had pressure-tested it the previous year and found no problems, I wasn't sanguine, but it was worth one last shot.

They tested it again and found not one but THREE holes, the largest around the suit inflation valve.  As the valve doesn't swivel and that's where I was getting wettest, that wasn't a major surprise, but I hadn't realised there were also holes in one arm and on my back.  So they fixed the holes, re-taped the neck and wrist seals, and gave it back to me for a reasonable sum.

I'd hoped to test it for real on a club dive down at St Abb's a couple of weekends ago, but the weather wasn't up to much so I didn't go.  Yesterday evening I gave it the "beginner's test", in the local swimming pool down to 3.6 metres.  Not a drop.  Totally dry.  Hallelujah!!

I do hope it'll be the same when I move that decimal point to 36....

The show goes on!

Dive 2011, Birmingham UK.
My dream drysuit – I’ve seen my dream drysuit!  At last someone has realised that black is boring.  And not very safe either, if you’re trying to keep track of your buddy in murky vis.  (Don’t get me started on cammo drysuits.  The invisible buddy – how are you going to keep an eye on him  if you can’t see him?!?)  Fish aren’t all black, so why should we be?

Nah.  This drysuit, by Hammond Drysuits of Dartford in Kent, had a different colour for each section.  Probably not a regular production number...  One arm was lemon yellow, another turquoise, the front of a leg was red, the back green –if I haven’t got exactly the right colour in the right place at least you get the drift.  Bright.  Cheerful.  VISIBLE.  Maybe a bit too visible for some – not everyone does the jester look well – but un-losable.  Better still, it might even keep you dry – a sore point with me at the moment...).

What else was on show at Dive 2011?  My prize for gizmo of the year goes to the TriDri, a handy telescopic tube with a fan at one end and an outlet the other, for drying drysuits.  I could really have used one last weekend – better still two, one in each boot!.  It’s triangular, so it rests on one edge and doesn’t roll around.  It folds quite small, so it’ll fit in your bag.  And it blows air forward into the toe of the boot, normally the hardest bit to dry. What’s more, it was so silent that the demonstrators had fitted strips of plastic to the top end so you could see there really was air blowing through it. 

In tests with a rinsed-out suit, indoors the leg with the TriDri dried in 2-3 hours while the other leg took 9 days; in the garage the figures were 3.5 hours and 14 days respectively.  It’s not yet in production, so if you know anyone who could make such a thing for a reasonable price (I’d happily pay up to £40 for one), get in touch with Dr. Howard Fortescue at howard@howard-f-fortescue.co.uk.

All the usual suspects were showing – Asia-Pacific and the Caribbean had “villages” of their own, PADI and BSAC were there in force.  The Photo Zone provided a colourful interlude, chats with Maria Munn’s enthusiastic staff, and a chance to vote on this year’s underwater photos of the year.  The rebreather market was well represented and the technical pool was constantly busy with divers putting kit to the test.

Competitions were rampant as travel companies tried to tempt divers to book now, right now, while the mood was on them; business is clearly still very tough for many, meaning bargains and emptier seas for divers. 

Among the speakers Andrea Marshall and Mack S House stood out for opposite reasons.  Mack House was speaking on Underwater Crime Scene Investigation, which should have been a fascinating topic.  Sadly he didn’t come alive (ironic, really) until he was answering questions at the end, by which time I’d lost interest in him and his subject. 

Andrea Marshall, who should have been talking about Manta rays, threw her brief out the window and gave an impassioned speech about conservation and how divers have a huge but time-limited opportunity to make a difference to the health of the watery 71%.  She apologised for being depressing but gave such a rousing call to action that no-one will have come out of that room untouched.

A busy weekend but a fascinating one, filled with friendly faces, glorious kit (I got the torch I needed at half-price, a spare undersuit for only £25, several books at reduced prices...), and so many opportunities. 

But the real revelation of the show was a new low in catering (cheese-on-toast-flavoured coffee, anyone?).

Into the murk.

Yesterday I went diving.  Nothing new there, but this summer has been different.  The weather has been no better or worse than previous years - indeed, a lot better than a couple of years ago when we had torrential rain almost every day - but the vis has been rubbish.

Now I don't know whether that's a cyclical thing - I haven't been diving long enough - or whether it's a freak of this year.  One of the club says it's the worst long-term vis he's ever known; another reckons it's a plankton bloom.  All I know is that if it had been like this last year I'd probably have given up diving, so I hope it doesn't put off this year's crop of trainees.

So - yesterday.  The sea was fairly calm in the bay at Catterline but as we headed north to Crawton it got choppier.  Arriving under the cliff a wall of noise and the stench of guano met us from thousands of nesting birds who dive-bombed us all the time we were above water, and the swell was very noticeable. 

If only they'd been this easy to see!

Once in the water I thanked Providence that my buddy (who was leading) had a white cylinder so at least there was something to spot.  The vis was maybe as much as 1 metre.  Looking very closely one could see that the wall would be very pretty, if only one could have seen more.  I did spot dead men's fingers, tiny anemones and a whole nursery of baby common starfish, plus a few sunstars.

I was diving with new neoprene socks in my wellies and soon started having trouble finning.  The socks are a lot thinner than my old feather-filled ones and don't fill up the boot in the same way so my boots and fins were heading south, away from my ankles.  Stopping to hoick them up, I lost sight of my buddy.  The training kicked in: look all around for 1 minute, go up a bit and look around some more, repeat until you reach the surface.  No sign of her until a flurry of bubbles erupted below me like tiny mercury parachutes and a DSMB popped up almost under my nose.  We must have been within a couple of yards of each other all along.  We gave up.  Total dive time: 10 minutes.

Three couples dived, none came up together.  I know there's no such thing as a bad dive, but some are definitely better than others!

The perils of pools.

Pool training - in a much bigger pool than we use!

We're now well into the pool training season.  For us, up here in north-east Scotland, it will last until late March-early April, depending on the weather.  That's a lot of time to spend in chlorine! 

I'm currently doing my BSAC Sports Diver training, so on Monday we were learning the correct "pistol grip" for towing and giving rescue breaths. Not too much of a problem, though I kept forgetting that I should keep my ring finger and pinkie bent under the "casualty's" chin; also, because it wasn't a real emergency, everything was done in slow motion.  It wouldn't feel like that in real life!  And I'm sure giving rescue breaths in choppy conditions is much harder.

Now there are two things you need to know for the rest of the story to make sense.  Firstly, there's a problem with the lift at the pool (it's only designed to carry wheelchair users, not the combined kit of the whole club), so we have to carry all our kit up to the first floor to start with, then down several steps to the pool-side, and then reverse the process after training.  It certainly improves our fitness...  And secondly, because my fins are big enough for my dry-suit boots, I wear wet-suit boots at the pool. They have quite grippy soles that should stop me slipping on the steps and the wet tiles around the pool.

So after the class I hefted my BC and cylinder up the steps to the top of the main stairs and headed back down for my fin-bag.  Whoosh!  My boots slipped on wet tiling and I did the last three steps on my bum and left elbow.  Not very comfortable.  I now have a black bruise on my left buttock as though someone's ridden a muddy mountain-bike across it and another, slightly less dramatic but equally painful, just below my left elbow.

And we do winter training in the pool because it's safer than the open sea.  Ironic, no?

The Slates

What do you do when the daytime temperature drops to 2C, the evenings close in and even the dogs can't raise the enthusiasm for a trip outside?  You dive, of course!

Shore diving was indicated, in case the weather was too rough to launch a boat, so we needed somewhere sheltered, easy to park, not too far to walk with all your kit, with acommodation and (of course!) a pub close by.  Somewhere we could get home from without trouble if the weather closed in.  Somewhere with something to see once we got underwater.  So off we went to Balachulish to investigate the Slates. 

The Slates is a well-known dive site but none of us had been there before.  We left our various warm beds early on Saturday morning and, after a glorious drive across Rannoch Moor and through Glencoe, met up at about 10.30.  A group of divers from Glasgow were already in the car park kitting up.  They'd been before and gave us some tips of stuff to look out for.  Apparently there was a wee wreck, a motor boat of about 20 ft length, at 12 metres (we looked twice but we never did find it).

We did two dives on Saturday, the water warmer than we expected, but on Sunday most of us only managed one dive: the air temperature had dropped and we all chilled as we clambered out of the water.  One hardy member, for whose kit the word "drysuit" was a real misnomer, did a second dive with a buddy who'd not been feeling too good first thing (the previous evening having been a good one...).

And what did we see?  We saw the sea.  And slate.  Lots of slate.  With very little life apart from Sea Loch anemones, a few Dead Men's Fingers, some very small fish and a lot of kelp.  A couple of empty bottles, a few old tyres and a length of tracking provided light relief.

I wouldn't rush back there, but it was good to get wet again.  (Mercifully, not inside: thanks to Splashsports in Dundee for the hire of a dry suit that lived up to its name!)

Wetsuit/drysuit.

When is a drysuit not a drysuit?  Usually, it seems.  Almost everybody I know has trouble with their suit.  I took mine in for repair the other day and mentioned that I was looking forward to having a watertight suit, and the guy fell about laughing.

If it's not the zip, it's the seals; failing the seals, it's a problem with the seams - either the stitching or the seam seals.  Or the fabric's worn at the knees.  Or the boots are not properly attached.  Or... or....  There always seems to be something.  I know divers who've sent their new suits back three or four times because they're getting damp inside.

When you're diving in the North Sea it matters.  It's a chilly place and often chillier up top between dives.  A surface interval which adds tipping rain to the miseries of damp (or worse) thermals is no fun.  But we persist in buying the things and in referring to them as "dry".  Why?

Back in the '70s everybody dived in wetsuits and it was normal to get a bit chilly.  Then the drysuit came along; now we've gone soft, and complain about getting wet.  A friend of mine decided this was a silly and expensive game with no winners and bought herself a semi-dry suit.  She expects to get a bit damp and carries a jacket and hat to wear between dives.  I think she may have made a sound choice.  It cost her under £200, instead of £400+ for the illusion of dryness.  Mind you, she hasn't dived in winter in that kit.

I'm looking forward to getting my suit back when the zip and the wrist- and neck-seals have been replaced.  It should arrive in time for me to go on a weekend of shore dives at Ballachulish later this month.  I wouldn't want to do that in a wetsuit, however thick the neoprene, not in mid-November.  Call me a softie if you like....

Perhaps I should have asked for a furry lining while I was at it!

Starfish, masks and copywriters.

It's been a while since I last posted here - I've been setting up my new website (same address as before but a very different look: http://www.greatcopy.info/), which has its own blog which has kept me busy.  Also I've decided to devote this blog to diving, so if you want to follow my pearls of wisdom about copywriting, words and life please go to http://greatcopy.info/blog/.  Actually, I've brought diving into the latest post there, too, but only because a word I came across was so appropriate to wreck diving.  I will try and keep them separate.  I knew there was a reason I called this blog "Starfish"....
    The thing is, I've become a bit obsessed with diving and I'm wondering how I can turn that into a business plan.  I did wonder about marketing under a fancy name the stuff I use to keep my mask clear, without telling anyone it's really baby-shampoo-and-water, but I'm not sure I'd get away with that!  [If you're a diver and have trouble keeping your mask clear, try it - it really works and it doesn't sting your eyes; "no more tears" is absolutely right.  I know spit's supposed to work, but I can't get enough of it together to do the job...  I ran out of the shampoo mix on my final dive last weekend, and I couldn't keep my mask clear at all.]
    Then I thought that there must be diving supply companies out there that need a copywriter. I haven't yet found a "hook" to approach them with; I'll have to think about that one. 
    The advice of everyone in the business is "You've got to specialise, find a niche to market to," and that would certainly be a good niche market.  It's big enough, though the major companies like Suunto probably have their own in-house writers, and it's something I know a bit about. 
    What I obviously need to do is get to one or two of the dive shows and meet some of the people in the business, get known (and, as it's business-related, I can put it on expenses.  I'm beginning to like this idea!).  The next one's Dive 2010 in Birmingham in October and there's rumoured to be one in Scotland but I can't find any sign of it.  It'd be fun to see all the kit, even if I can't afford to buy it, and get more of a feel for the lingo (that's one thing about a niche, you really have to speak the lingo fluently or you stick out like a little finger on a porcelain tea-cup).
    It's a plan of sorts; now to put it into action, starting with a warm-up email to all the Birmingham exhibitors.

    Ah well - I tried to keep it diving-related, but copywriting will keep butting in.  That's life!