Diving the Tuncurry

10 meter viz sounds pretty good for a dive in Sydney of late, but when I left my house this morning that is what I had on the F3 for the drive up to the Central Coast!

Sydney and surrounds was blanketed in a thick layer of fog and there were places where I could hardly see the road. On the positive side, a thick fog usually means no wind (as that would blow it away), so maybe we would have a nice dive.

After a bit of a stressful drive, I finally made it to Ettalong, parked (we beat the Scuba Shack divers to the wharf and got some of the few remaining unlimited parking spaces) and caught up with the lads as everyone turned up. Usual banter and piss taking ensued and everyone was in high spirits – we were going to dive the Tuncurry and the conditions were looking great!

We quickly loaded the boat – we’ve got this part running like clockwork now – everyone puts their gear on the wharf, we wait for the 8am Palm Beach ferry to leave, tie up and form a chain to load up, and off we went. Look out Tuncurry!!!

Had a very quick run out to the wreck as the seas were so flat and we arrived onsite in record time, we quickly found the wreck on the sounder and launched the anchor. Fingers crossed we’d hit it.

We’d be diving in three groups today, Spiro, Grant & I would we first in, another group would gear up straight after us, arriving just as we were leaving the bottom and the third would boat-sit until we finished our deco and arrived back on board (ensuring that someone was always on the boat).

I quickly geared up, checked the PO2 on my CCR, all good, turned on my torch, not good – it didn’t work??? smack it on the boat a couple of times, nope, it’s dead! Oh well, never mind, pulled out my backup and it was working so I’ll deal with that later and splashed in.

Aaaarrrrrrggggghhhh!!! sh#t!!! Now my drysuit was leaking and I could feel what felt like a river rushing into the back of my suit and running down my leg, filling my suit! And it was cold!

OK, so torch is cactus and suit is filling with water, now I have to decide: do I pull the pin or do I live with the cold and keep going?

Always the optimist when it comes to diving, I hoped for the best and kept going, and as I passed the 50m mark and I couldn’t feel any more water coming in. Not sure if something was blocking the hole or I had gone so numb I couldn’t feel it anymore, but whatever it was, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I’ll take it. I’d figure out later that day that the hole was cause by my rebreather rubbing and wearing the suit and in certain positions the rebreather case would put just enough pressure on the suit to block it.

Arrived on the wreck to find the sitting on the cement bags – Yay, we’d hit the wreck! As I was first down, quickly found somewhere to tie in and launched the cricket ball, so the guys on th3 boat would know we were securely on the wreck and they could tie up.

We had about 8m vis on the wreck and no current, so we had a nice, calm potter around. As I had a flooded suit, I kept an eye on the TTS on my vision handset (time to surface) as I didn’t want to long a hang, and all to soon my 30 minute limit was reached, so after 26 minutes I left the bottom. Deco passed smoothly until the 6m mark, where my suit started leaking again??? Spent the next 20 minutes alternating positions, trying to stop the leak – seemed ever time I moved my leg, the hole opened up and let more water in.

Finally, my computer cleared and I was climbing back onto the boat (and out of the water).

Got out of my gear, helped Mike & Doug into the water, and waited for everyone else to complete their stops.

All to soon, everyone was back on board and we were heading home, wet, tired and happy – another great dive!!!

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