First Dive in the UK!

Did my first dive in the UK on Friday of last week! I went to the Blue Lagoon inland lake. I hired some kit from TigerDive and went with a few of the people who frequent their online forum. We got there and we started kitting up and the day nearly ended there in disaster. The high pressure hose to the SPG blew on my hired regulator! Never seen that happen before and it really did scare me.

Fortunately I was able to borrow a set of regulators from one of the dive masters there, and I had only lost 20 bar of pressure despite all the noise it made. It really was true what I read about the pin hole in the high pressure hose reducing air flow It was a beautiful sunny day and in the end we got into the water. It wasn’t as deep as their site claimed (or we couldn’t find the deep bit) - we managed a maximum depth of 6 m and didn’t see any fish. I did see some newts, tadpoles and lots of tiny larvae.

The first dive was just under an hour and I came up with half a tank left. The water was lovely and warm but I discovered 6 kg was too much lead. We had a nice cup of coffee and a great bacon sandwich, after which we went in for another short dive. We looked around the boat wrecks and the tank. There was also an artillery gun that was on its side and a few platforms to sit on. I practiced inflating an SMB too - good for when we go diving in the Farne Islands at the end of the month.

It was a good laugh although I do prefer diving in the sea I think… The equipment issues pushed me into getting my own gear sooner rather than later too. I got myself an Apeks XTX50 regulator set up with the nice DIN300 fittings, and a ScubaPro Knighthawk BCD which is pretty nice with the tech wing style inflation at the back and integrated weights. It was a gentle introduction to UK diving with a bit of a scare at the start of the day - thankfully everything went smoothly after that