Sunday 9th May 2004
Portland, UK
Countess of Erne
14m, 11 degrees, 4m vis, 36% nitrox, Paul and Teach buddies

The wind had dropped off overnight to be replaced by rain. On the plus side we had Top Gun to ourselves again. The dives on offer were up for debate, and my input was 'not a drift, how about the Countess?' I have dived the countess a couple of times before but not properly, s today, armed witha tail weight and no belt, to see if trim would improve we headed out. There was already a RIB on the bow, which was a shame, but we saw no other divers and if they had been in they had done a great job of not stirring up the silt that the wreck sits in. We headed down the stern shot. My trim was a little better, but still not great. The dive was, however, very nice. We did two laps of the wreck, once along the top deck (she sits proud), once along the port side and both times we returnd through the holds. It is not a difficult penetration - straight line, no dangly bits and always ambient light, but you are close to the silt and it was nice to see that we did not kick it up at all. Add to that the fact that I was quite easily locating my knobs, which measn I should be able to shutdown quite easily, and you have a very nice 40mins in the water.

The very last dip was not a dive but a bouyancy check. Back at the harbour and with 30bar left in the twins I removed the large v-weight and replaced it with a small single one and the tail weight. It tok a little effort - but not too much - to get off of the surfact, but once at 1.5m I was fine. So yes, I had been overweighted and had not been dumping from the wing properly - just as Izzy, Nina and Teach had suspected. More to work on next time, but sadly that was the weekend over.