Day 2 - Orkney SCUBA Day 1
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Hobbit Writes ...
Our boat is the Storm Drift, Captain Hazel. She is the only local person I can understand. Our first dive was cold, but uneventful. A good thing when diving.
We shopped at Lyness for lunch. There was a mom and her 8-year-old. Mom was talking to another lady about old lady stuff. The 8-year-old just sat there. He didn’t fidget, fuss, whine or complain. He didn’t have anything to do, no toys. He was happy to just sit. You’d never see that in a big city. The kid would demand constant stimulation.
We goobered the second dive. We were dropped over the wreck, but we managed to miss it. So we decided to scallop instead. Not being completely sure what a scallop was, I picked up some shell animal things and showed it to Wendell. He shrugged, so I put some in the bag. At the end of the dive, I finally found one scallop, so now I knew what to look for. But we had to go up. Hazel said the things I picked up were horse mussels and no good, so I threw them back. Turns out that Kay would’ve cooked those up, too.
At one point during the dive Wendell spotted a patch of sand that might be a scallop and started digging, but stirred up dirt. So when the dirt cleared, I tried to fish it out; however, as I was fishing two very large claws came grabbing at me from out of the sand. I backed up so fast, I came right out of my dry suit. Wendell managed to get the VERY LARGE crab out of the sand, but it was a girl and we had to leave it.
I get land sickness pretty bad, so this time I got Transderm. My brain and inner ear and the drug were communicating in interesting ways:
Inner ear: Whoa, the ground is mov...
Drug: Noitsnot.
Inner ear: No, really. It’s...
Drug: Noitsnot
This went on for a while.
It is weird to see whole entire islands that are completely under cultivation, no wild bits left at all.
Captain Hazel
What The Heck Is A DSMB?
Captain Hazel asked, "Do you have a DSMB?"
"DSMB? What's a DSMB?"
"Delayed Surface Marker Buoy," explained Captain Hazel.
"I've never heard of one," I said.
Hazel brought one out and set it on the table.
"Oh, a Whale Condom! We left ours at home. Can we borrow yours?"
It works as follows: when divers are at the end of their dive, they hover underwater for a moment, pull out the reel and attach it to the Whale Condom. They unroll the condom, then, using a regulator and purge valve, they half-fill the condom with air. As the condom rises, the water pressure decreases so the air expands, filling the condom. Once it reaches the surface, the divers start winding up the reel, rising slowly up to where the condom is bobbing on the surface. Because the current pulls the condom at the same rate as the divers, the boat captain can easily see where the divers are going to surface. The captain then maneuvers the boat to the divers, who can then climb aboard without a long surface swim.
DSMB deployed divers below
DSMB and divers on surface
Stormdrift
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