Paul Kidson

Just sat down to log this weeks dive and have realised that it’s actually my 200th dive   I tell you,  I couldn’t have asked for a better dive to celebrate with though.

We were convinced on Wednesday that the dive would be called off but by the time we got to West Bay on Thursday it was dead flat, not even a ripple out there.

A lot of the regular divers are back, people like Tony Gates, Phil the Baker and Margot.  Still missing Mat Follas though, can’t really blame the guy, setting up a restaurant must be a right pain in the arse!  That’s what you get for winning Masterchef though.  Fourteen of us went out in all and with Gates on board there was plenty of banter.  We went out further than usual too, usually on a Thursday we just pootle out to Sawtooth Ledges but this time we went out further to East Tennents.

East Tennents is a world apart from Sawtooth.  Sawtooth is mostly flat sand with rocky ledges but East Tennents is much more interesting, it’s like diving in a field of boulders with loads of ledges and cracks to look in/under.  Plenty of fish life out here too.

In fact some of use were having a little bit too much fun!  Shompy, my regular buddy, decided he didn’t want to come up when I told him we were already on for eight minutes deco, a bit of underwater communications and we agreed on another ten minutes of bottom time.  All well and good but just hanging at five metres for the twenty minutes it took to decompress wasn’t so much fun!  We were last (by quite a margin) back on to the boat and received a cheer and a “about bloody time” from Gates.  Oh well, it was a great dive and I don’t think any of the others really cared

So there you go, Dive number 200 done with a total run time of 1hr03 minutes

Forgot to post these up from a dive a couple of weeks ago, went ferreting round in the ledges looking for something interesting and found this!  Just the right size for the pot

Before and after shots…