Jon’s Diary

At 9am yesterday morning, I was standing on the edge of a quarry in Dosthill wearing a drysuit and a load of scuba gear. Peering into the water as I took my “giant stride” off the steps, the only thing I could think about was how my drysuit had leaked both times I’d worn one in the pool.

To my relief, my drysuit didn’t leak this time and we managed to make 3 dives without getting wet! For the first time (and thankfully on my first 3 uses in UK open water) the Gryphon drysuit I was using lived up to the slogan on its logo… “get wet, stay dry!”.

Our first and second dives were both multi-level dives, both of which started with a descent to 18 metres. Our final dive of the day was for our peak performance bouyancy speciality.
We also dived on nitrox for the first and last dives, and so managed to do dives for 3 specialities.

Dosthill wasn’t a very exciting place to go diving. The visibility was very poor due to the amount of silt floating in it. At a depth of 18 metres, visibility was down to about 2 or 3 metres. Certainly not a patch on the Caribbean!

I started my PADI Advanced Open Water course yesterday. I’m doing the course with Gryphon Watersports, who are based on the A5 just west of Cannock.
They have a special offer on at the moment, which includes the Advanced Open Water, and 5 specialities (drysuit, nitrox, O2 admin, peak performance bouyancy, underwater navigation) for the combined price of £450, saving approx. £400!

Yesterday I did the classroom parts of the 02 admin and nitrox specialities, and then did the exams in the afternoon. I passed both of them, and thankfully that’s all of the classroom work out of the way. I now have 8 dives to do, which will cover all of the required parts to complete the AOW and the specialities. I’m off to the pool tonight to have another play about in a drysuit, and then on sunday I will do my first 3 open water dives in the UK.

We left Stourbridge at about 4am on Friday morning, and by 6am we were standing at the British Airways check-in desk in Heathrow’s Terminal 4. Our flight departed on time at 9:50am, and before long we were well into our in-flight movies.
There was nothing spectacular about the 12 hour flight from Heathrow to Grand Cayman. I passed some time taking pictures of clouds, with this one being one of the best:

We had a 1 hour stop at Nassau in the Bahamas to drop off some passengers, before continuing on to Grand Cayman. This is a sand bar just north of Nassau:

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