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Well, I was toying with not starting this until I was actually back in the UK, but seeing as I have some free time I figured I’d try and jot down a few things now and see where it gets to.

Basically, tomorrow night I will be getting on a plane in Cairo and flying back to Manchester, on a one-way ticket, effectively bringing to an end my working in Egypt for the past 3 years.
It’s a little bit weird. But at the same time I’m looking forward to being back.

Anyway, the next stretch of text doesn’t really have a structure as of yet, but I’ve got a feeling it could be fairly long-winded, so I’ll try to break it up as best I can.

Arrival

I first arrived in Egypt in the late hours of 4^th November 2004 completely and utterly confused.
I was being met by someone I’d never met before, jumping on a bus with him, and taking another 12 hour journey to Marsa Alam before I could consider ’settling in’.
The night I arrived in Cairo coincided with a popular local football match that had just finished, leaving huge traffic jams, excessive car horn blaring, and people running around all excited with victory. I was just confused.
After finally getting to the bus station and getting sat on a crowded bus, we set off and I tried (ineffectively) to get some sleep.
6 hours later we got to Hurghada, spent an hour driving around in a taxi trying to find a hotel where we could get a few hours of sleep before meeting guests that were arriving that night… all in the first day.

Another interesting fact that came up here was that when I arrived in Egypt, unbeknown to me, the month of Ramadan was already under way. Not speaking any Arabic, and not knowing the place, and being with Yasser who was fasting, effectively left me without food until sunset. That’s not a complaint by the way, it just added to the overall surreal atmosphere of the first few hours in the country, away from everything I knew and understood. It was all outweighed by the fact that once the sun did go down, we had some cracking local grub just around the corner from the hotel. Lots of foul, falafels and all that good stuff. Yasser was good company and did his utmost to make sure I was alright.

The next phase was out of his control though – going to the airport to collect a group of Polish guests who were heading down to the Marsa Alam camp with us. We went to the airport after eating, then proceeded to wait for roughly 6 hours as their flight was delayed. Champion.

So, by the time they arrived and we were finally able to set off to the Deep South Diving Center and Camp where I was to be learning the local dive sites for the next few weeks, I passed out in the back of the taxi and woke up when we arrived at the camp around sunrise, at 0600, my internal body clock completely out of sync with having had little sleep, and the only sleep achieved being during daylight hours. However, we quickly got stuff sorted, met Karim and the staff there, unpacked my dive gear, and a couple of hours later I was in the water checking my weights and seeing the local dive sites. The tiredness and confusion soon passed.

The Deep South Experience

The location and layout of the camp at Marsa Um Tundoba is great. With a hilltop open-fronted chillout spot (now decorated as a bar) able to look over the sea and sunrise to the east and towards the hills, mountains and sunset in the west, it provides pretty dramatic landscapes at any time of the day.
Powered by generators running for a few hours each day, with a small number of two person huts, with shared bathrooms and one large restaurant area with floor seating and having similar views to the bar area at the top of the hill, the whole camp was completely different to anything I could have pictured or imagined, but in a good way.
In all honesty, settling in took longer than I thought it would, most probably due to it being so dramatically different. The people were cool, the place was cool, the diving was… cool, and the mosquitoes feasted on my skin every night – they loved it, but it took me a while to manage any real sleep. Having never really encountered mosquitoes before (that I could remember anyway) they took some getting used to, and I spent the first few weeks covered in little red blotches. No amount of repellent seemed to work and in the end it seemed to come down to just working out the most efficient way of sleeping, being covered up, but not cooking yourself in the process. In my own humble way, I like to think I did friggin’ excellently conjuring up that solution. Kinda.

To be honest, there’s really not that much more I can add on the Deep South experience for those first 6 weeks without going into even more mundane detail than is necessary. After about two weeks there I had a 2 day spell of shitting brown water during which I was unable to do very much except feel sorry for myself but – touch wood – that was the only time during my entire time here that I ever got sick, which I think is par for the course. Your body takes a battering adjusting at first, and then just deals with it.

As already mentioned, my initial spell at Deep South was for just 6 weeks, after which I came back to the UK for Christmas and New Year. The original plan at that point was to come back to a basically-ready MV Tala, although in the end that wasn’t quite what happened.

The ‘Gap’

Even when I was first leaving from Cairo, it was obvious the boat wasn’t going to be ready until I got back, and reasonably it was expected it would be a couple of months late. In the meantime I’d be back in Deep South continuing to learn the sites and generally get some diving in. Which is nice.

AG came down in January giving me a chance to video and listen in on Tech 1 classes – all good stuff – and myself and Faisal started doing some dives and managing to keep pushing myself bit by bit. There was a lot of good stuff to learn.
Various things continued to hold the boat up, and in turn my time at Deep South extended right until the end of May, when I came back for a little while before heading back out to join a finally finished Tala to have her first trips in late summer.

It’s fair to at least claim that this time was ‘wasted’ in terms of what I could have been earning. Whilst I probably earned more than most of the guys in the camp overall, it was still considerably less than I could have earned if I’d have stayed in the UK, even with the extra expenses involved with that.
And I don’t regret sticking it out at the camp at all, and would rather argue that the time really wasn’t wasted, if only from the standpoint of slowly getting used to the differences between being in Egypt and being in the UK (“Egyptian Time” is only a small part of this). Besides which, staying out allowed me to do plenty of diving, and get to know Karim and Faisal better, all of which have helped make the rest of my time out here much easier, and develop good friendships, as well as the other people I met through them.
No, I definitely wouldn’t take the different route if I had chance to choose again.

Other than that, there’s not much more to add to that intervening period. I was, of course, disappointed that the boat stuff hadn’t gone through as planned, but then I could hardly blame anyone for that, these things just happen, and it’s not as if I was the only person it not being ready would affect!

M/V Tala – The Early Phases

So, finally, towards the end of summer 2005, we started the first few trips with the newly finished boat, mainly with Russian guests.

At this point, it’s probably fair to say that our (Faisal’s and mine) collective liveaboard experiences didn’t really amount to much, my only previous trip being cut short by having to evacuate a guest to the chamber, and Faisal also being new to the game. We had on board an Egyptian guide who Faisal had had recommended and who seemed to talk the talk. In all honesty, he just failed to walk the walk. To me, in a purely personal opinion, I could never adapt to the guy. He seemed up himself, over-confident and nearly always wrong. He was difficult to get on with on a number of levels, although it’s probably fair to say that at least one of those levels I can take some of the blame for, in that I simply didn’t understand him as a person. He was nice enough, but it all seemed superficial. But I’m probably being harsh.

Anyway, we plodded on, spending most of the first year doing things my body really didn’t appreciate: diving our asses off, partying like crazy, sleeping minimally, and occasionally drinking excessively.

It was a lot of fun, but by the time it came for a rest, I think I actually heard my inner self subtly scream “Thank fuck for that!”. It was after that first season that I pretty much realized things needed to sharpen up in terms of doing things ‘properly’, as otherwise I simply wouldn’t be able to keep up with such a cycle – it makes it very easy to see how folk suffer burnout in that sort of environment.

The Latter Part

The remaining time there went remarkably quick, all things considered, and included some superb mini-projects and individual dives, and generally a lot of laughs. With the Egyptian guide gone from the boat, it was down to Faisal and I to run everything, pretty much off the top of our heads and, whilst it may not be too modest, I thing we finally did a pretty good job. We had difficulties, but managed to get round them (more credit to Faisal than me on that though), and plodded on through the season, still with a lot of merriment, but a little bit more toned down (overall) than the year before. Well, kinda…

Ironically, I also had during this time a couple of pissed off moments, as the blog will no doubt attest to but, looking back, I think they were more an example of me getting pissed off with myself than with whatever I’d choose to blame. Whatever the reason, it soon passed.

The season went well, and culminated in a fun week that was not only full of some great diving with a small, well qualified group, but also resulted in a small magazine article with my own text – that was quite cool to get.

Start of the next season had Mo come join us to work on the boat, meaning Faisal could take a bit more time off you, you know, be a boss. Mo was a friend of Faisal’s from Beirut, and I think it’s fair to say the pair of us got on well right from the off, even if the first week was full of various problems. Having worked in diving in quite a few other places including Cypress and Beirut, Mo had plenty of experience and useful tips and was a lot of fun to have around. We also had a few great parties, and he did his best to educate me in some of the rules of The Game although, to be fair, I was shit.

That season passed, and Mo headed back to Lebanon for a while, putting myself and Faisal back on for the next season. In addition to that, we got a lot of help from Stijn, a Belgian dive guide who’d run the Belgian trips from Blue Paradise that we’d had on for a few weeks each season since the year before. Like with Mo, I found Stijn easy to get on with, and with a shed-load of experience running Belgian liveaboard trips in the Red Sea – whilst we didn’t always get the chance to party quite as hard with the Belgians as we did the Russians, we still got some insanely fun dives, usually making full use of the scooters and chasing sharks.

With that season ended, and my final one about to begin, Mo was back around for another fairly intensive season. In terms of things coming together and being more organized, I think it was clear by this season that it had been getting better all the time. The workload was heavy but we all seemed to gel properly and get things done. Nothing’s perfect, but as a comparison to where we had been and what we’d come to, I think it’s fair to say we’d done good.

Done and Dusted

And that was that. A quick(ish) run-down of my spending three years in Egypt. Although I finished this a lot later than when I originally started it, I’ve tried to skip through later things to keep from repeating myself – needless to say I could have gone on much longer with various little stories and anecdotes which, whilst they were funny to me, would probably not do much for any folks reading it.

I had a blast during my time there, and met some great people I’ll no doubt keep in touch with for a long time but, I guess, at the end of the day, three years was enough for me right now.

Do I have any regrets about doing it? None at all.

Did I give it up because I got bored of it? Not really. I’m still eager to dive and teach and enjoyed the work to the full while I was doing it.

Would I do it all again, given the chance? Damn right I would – I think I got plenty done in that time and got a lot out of it personally, not limited to life experience. I think the only difference if I was to do it again would be that I’d have to go ‘all out’ and actually live there, as opposed to the ‘Suitcase Living’ that I was doing recently.
Don’t misunderstand though, that was fun, but by the end of three years of doing it, it got tiresome. And I just don’t think I’m quite prepared to fully move away from the UK yet. Maybe I never will. We’ll see.

One dive, 85 minutes, 2 scooters, maximum depth 27 metres. And a lot of fun.

It’s these sort of dives that really remind me exactly how fun things can be when you put your mind to it. Video editing was fun, and something I hadn’t really played with much before, but want to get more familiar with.

Still, a lot of stuff we could / should have done, but all useful notes to bear in mind next time we try to do a similar thing. I’ve always enjoyed diving with Hassan and look forward to doing some more stuff like this in the future.

Most enjoyable.

Video Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULhxpWpnF2o

I know it’s not a hugely popular one to pick on, given the number of organisations who swear by them, but to me they seem to be the perfect example of (yet another) crutch people take with them because:

1. It’s what they were told
2. They don’t know any better
3. They think it makes a difference

The point is that none of the reasons are particularly valid.

Of course, everybody will come up with other reasons as to why they take their snorkel with them (’in case I’m stuck with a long surface swim’; ’so I don’t use my air on the surface’; ‘in case the weather’s rough and I need to swim back to the boat’ etc. etc.), but the point is that all are solutions to problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place, if everything is truly covered to an adequate level of safety.

The simple fact of the matter is this: Snorkels are for Snorkelling.

Snorkels only have any real application when you are within centimetres of the surface, which for 95% of my time in the water (if not more) is simply not the case. For all the added complexities a snorkel adds to gear configuration (dangling and dragging from the mask, causing confusion and irritation in a gas sharing situation, generally being an object that screams ‘entangle me!’ to any loose line or catchy bits) it doesn’t give enough in return to be worth taking. Even if you strap the thing to your leg, as some people do, it only serves to add an extra ‘hook point’ (however small) to your gear, and it does so in the one place you’d struggle to get to if entanglement occurred or if you needed to use it – if you don’t need it, don’t take it.

For all the arguments thrown above, there is a much simpler way to solve the initial problem.

1. Using Air on the Surface

Simply put using your air on the surface shouldn’t be a huge deal, provided you account for it in your gas planning, and your gas planning is correct. If you know that you use, on the surface, say 1 bar / minute from whatever tank configuration you are diving (which, by the way, is an easy calculation to learn and use regularly) and you know you have to swim 5 minutes to and from the site you want to do, then you can calculate that you should use 5 bar each way, and so you will need 10 bar for the two legs of the journey. Perhaps you want to factor in some reserve in case you have to work hard, in which case you can apply it appropriately (say another 10 bar in this example). That means you need to plan for using 20 bar to go to and come back from the dive. So you can simply take this figure off from the amount of Usable Gas you have (Starting Pressure – Minimum Gas) and see how it affects what you want to do (in most scenarios this will probably make the difference of 1 or 2 minutes over the course of your dive) – suddenly you realize that it’s not that huge a difference. Of course, if 1 or 2 minutes is too big a difference for you to handle (maybe because the dive site is going to disappear… ?:-/) then you’ve just told yourself that you should be diving a higher capacity backgas (be that doubles or a larger single tank). Taking a snorkel in this case simply does nothing but add confusion for, potentially, the sake of 1 or 2 minutes, although by using the snorkel and dealing with the water entering / having to be cleared during the swim, you may end up so tired at the start of the dive that you use this amount of gas anyway on descent. But what you have done is add an extra piece of gear that you don’t need.

2. So I don’t use my Air on the Surface

See above. Plan your gas properly…

3. Rough Weather

As alluded to in Point 1, this is also a completely counter-intuitive, but oft-mentioned reason for taking a snorkel, especially when diving from boats – “There are some big waves between the boat and the descent point so I can’t have nothing protecting my air way”.

While the reasoning is good – you certainly don’t want to be stuck on the surface in bad weather without a surefire way to be receiving air all the time – the choice of snorkel over regulator is insane. The regulator is simply the better choice, in all situations. The regulator is attached to your tank, and forms a sealed system to deliver air without water. The snorkel is an open tube to the environment. This means that whilst it is realistic to expect at least some water to get into the snorkel (especially true in bad weather, regardless of your snorkel technique), it is virtually impossible (barring opening your mouth, which would be dumb in any situation) to get water into the regulator feeding you your air. This in turn means that the regulator provides less hassle than the snorkel, which makes it both easier and more efficient… so why take the snorkel?

Again it would seem the reason comes down to being Point 1 again, and the issue of ‘wasting’ gas supply. See Point 1 for why this is (or should be) nonsense.

Again, it ultimately comes down to a matter of education, which is a reflection of the fact that diving is an ‘alien’ activity – it’s not something we were meant to do or designed to do. This means that anyone receiving instruction will be receiving (in most cases) completely fresh information. As I believe the phrase goes, Shit Sticks, and people are very hesitant to question what they hear first, and keep going through it until they are finally convinced that it’s wrong. As with most things in the dive industry, so many people have done it / been taught it so repetitively that they rarely have to question it, so it sticks. Equally, it’s not a huge safety issue in itself, and I doubt many (if any) people have died from it, so people ignore it. But the fact is that whether it is life-threatening or not, it is not as efficient as it could be, and is a very easy change to make. If you stop striving to make things more efficient and effective then you are making a backwards step – in any area / sport / technology. Some things just make more sense, even if they are telling you that you’re wrong. It can be a bitter medicine to swallow.

Just to reiterate though, this is not a dig at snorkels are general. Snorkels are great and suit their purpose fantastically, but:

Snorkels are for Snorkelling, not for Diving

Salem Express with Brad Williamson

This was the second dive of the trip, after a quick check dive at Abu Hasshish, and whilst it wasn’t my ‘biggest’ dive on the Salem Express (which is a wreck I don’t particularly get too excited about in general) but it was definitely one of the most fun because of the experience of diving with Brad again. This was fun as Brad was last out with us in September when I conducted the Open Water qualifying dives for him and Di, his mum. Basically, it wasn’t until this dive that I realized just how fun and rewarding it is to be able to just go diving and have fun with someone you (me), personally, I’ve been responsible for training.

Of course, I still have responsibilities and things to worry about not least of which is the fact that Brad’s only 11, but he really is a very competent diver for his age and limited number of dives. Over the course of the week we did a number of dives together and he continues to go from strength to strength, diving wrecks, swimthroughs, and even going scootering with us. Super cool.

Having the chance to dive with him again and to see someone you’ve trained getting such enjoyment from the activity is immensely rewarding, and made it one of the coolest 12 metre dives I think I’ve done so far.

Sha’ab Sharm with Dave Williamson

Day 2, first dive of the day, with Dave, Brad’s dad.

Now, I’ve dived a fair amount with Dave in the past already, and he did Tech 1 with AG at the same time as me, albeit within a different team, so it’s always good to go for a dive with him. This dive though was one to remember.

Over the night the wind had picked up so we were dropping in by Zodiac whilst the boat stayed tied up in the sheltered part of the reef. There was very little current to worry about so we pretty much could go where we liked. We headed out over the plateau and as soon as we got to it we were greeted by a White Tip Reef Shark – not exactly a rare sighting but still, always cool to see. Next to it was a small school of Barracuda. So far so good for 10 minutes in. We played around on the plateau for a bit longer, all the time hearing dolphins in the water somewhere, but without seeing them. Eventually I switched off to the noises and resigned myself to not seeing any as we pottered around on the plateau in around 30m of water for a bit longer, whilst the rest of our group moved on. After about 20 minutes we decided to leave and headed back off in the direction of the boat. I turned around have one last check of the plateau behind us when I spotted what I thought at first was a Manta Ray, although checking later it turned out to be a Devil Ray, which I haven’t seen before. It didn’t stay with us too long, just drifted past us and headed across the plateau. After appreciating it for a little while we carried on up the reef, finishing the stops before swimming off into the blue a little way to finish the dive under the boat.

At this point I hear the dolphins again. Loud. I signal to Dave and he returns that he hears them as well. I look around for about a minute and then I spot them swim past us, right below us, and then off under the boat and away. A nice way to end an incredible dive.

Sha’ab Maksour – ‘The Crack’ with Phil Osborn and Andrew Buglass

Day 3, second dive. Myself, Phil, and Andrew are taking the scooters out to dive the crack at the tip of the Northern Plateau at Sha’ab Maksour, to a maximum depth of 60m. Backgas is 18/45, carrying one Deco Bottle of EANx50. Planned bottom time 15 minutes, with 25 minutes of Deco for an average depth of 51m.

The zodiac ride out there was a bit of fun, with some big waves to handle, along with keeping the deco bottles and scooters comfortable. However, once we hit the water everything was good.

We tidied things off just below the surface due to the swell, and after a few minutes started our scooter descent down to the crack which, having looked at it from the 30m mark on my first dive an hour earlier looked, to use a favourite expression, the balls. What this dive is, basically, is where a huge piece of reef at the end of the plateau has ‘broken off’, leaving a divide in the reef and providing swimthrough opportunities and general diving enjoyment. I’ve tried to dive this particular dive one year ago with Hassan Adly, but with not knowing the site, we believed it to be further to the East and so we missed it. I won’t be doing that again…

As we hit the 30m mark the crack appeared right below us. I signalled to descend and hit the trigger on the scooter to propel myself right down into the gap in the reef, turning level again around 51m and scootering out of the bottom of the main break at a maximum depth of 55m. A few more loops around and general fun making around there and we were done. We headed off to the West (more sheltered) side of the plateau and scootered along the wall whilst moving slowly through our deep stops until the gas switch, at which point we packed the scooters away and decided to stage switch / shoot bags / deco without the scooters, due to personal comfort levels, which was cool. We started to move slowly with the current heading down along the reef whilst moving through the 21 – 9m stops. However, after 9 we found ourselves heading into a ‘white zone’ caused by the waves. It was still a fairly calm section but it meant visibility got reduced to nearly nothing. I opted to signal we should scooter out from under this section at 9m and then resume our 6m stops after we were out of it. This was agreed upon and we started to head off.

A minute or two later, and just out of the white zone we were greeted by a spectacular site: 9 Devil Rays swimming together right below us by what seemed like only a few metres. I couldn’t believe it and frantically signalled to the rest of the team. We all came off the trigger and watched the Rays cruise on past us and back up the reef, at which point we continued our scootering and headed up to 6m for the final part of the stops. A few minutes later whilst looking back to see how we were doing I saw the Rays again coming back past us and in the direction we were heading.

I couldn’t believe it.

This time I decided to stay on the trigger and just cruised along right above the group of rays completely and utterly awestruck. As they eventually turned back from where they came we all came off the trigger, shook our heads, and finished the remaining few minutes of Deco. I don’t know about the others, but I personally couldn’t wait to break the surface and start laughing / talking about the experience. A great feeling.

Surprisingly enough, the zodiac ride back to the boat and the subsequent dives were flooded with happy feelings. Immense.

And there we have it, a quick selection of some super dives, for a few different reasons.

Other than that, the week was fun on board as well, with plenty of jokes, parties, dancing, and general merriment, all of which meant that today, after about 3 nights with only a few hours sleep, meant that I slept like a sleepy thing, but that’s always the way when things suddenly halt instantly and you realise you don’t have to rush around doing things any more. Maybe now I can finally catch up on reading Roon’s bits and bobs, as well as seeing if I can crack on through The Idiot but Dostoyevsky that I’ve just recently started.

Hopefully I’ll also get the chance to add some more pictures from the last couple of weeks, so check out the Gallery to see if I managed to do that yet..!

Sun is shining, the weather is sweet, yeh. Maybe I’ll manage to head back down to Tundoba over the next few days (after checking emails and posting this stuff) and get some more dives in.

The subject, in case you care, is my drysuit, the new one that I got a few months ago made by Diving Concepts and which I wrote about here.

The problem it developed is that it sprang a leak in the crotch strap area, presumably cause by rubbing by the crotch strap when scootering, although maybe by swimming.

Now, I haven’t checked the dates precisely, but my guess is that by the time the leak appeared, the suit had done approximately 50 dives, maybe even less, and only around 10 or 20 of those will have been scooter dives. For an approximately $1000 dollar suit, I find that pretty unimpressive, crotch strap or no.

It’s also frustrating because, barring the leak, it’s a well made suit. It fits well off the shelf and allows really good flexibility for reaching valves and doing the various things that need to be done.

Fortunately, the problem is easily solved with a touch of Aquasure and a neoprene patch cover over the ‘rubbing spot’ which seems to have done the trick. However, how difficult could it be for Diving Concepts to include such a piece as standard, especially on a suit designed for ‘technical’ divers – whether you agree that they exist or not…

Time will tell how long it lasts, but I think it should be good now for a good while, but it certainly knocked my confidence in Diving Concepts to the point that I don’t personally know whether I’ll invest in another suit of theirs anytime soon unless such niggles get ironed out, especially considering I could get a brand new fully made-to-measure Protec Explorer like my other suit (that’s done around 500 dives without a leak) for just a few hundred bucks more.

Still, it’s all a learning curve I guess!

Needless to say though, I’ve been impressed by the changes, and really look forward to some of the diving we’ve got planned for this season.

Unfortunately, I had hoped to be able to write more about what’s been changed, why it’s improved etc, but I think I left it too late and my brain has ceased to function properly. Maybe I’ll edit this in at a later date, or in another post.

For now though, I’m going to go back on board and spend some time watching the freshly downloaded Elephant’s Dream. I’m anticipating an interesting watch.

Whilst it’s nice that the text in the magazine is nearly word for word what was in the original post, it’s a shame that some parts haven’t been typed up correctly (ie, the use of ‘my’ instead of M/Y as was / should have been in the original, but it works.

Still, kind of cool to have something I wrote actually published in a magazine, even if it is of limited value to the wider world!

Home

• Desk Space
  It occurred to me over New Year that my desk is simply too small for what I want it to do. I took a couple of pictures to prove my point, which will hopefully appear here:
  
  As you can see, even with the chair moved out of the way, the desk space is severely limited, especially when the laptop is out, making simple tasks such as mouse management or keyboard control a bit of a pain in the arse as I find myself with my arms at weird angles or without really being able to have any support or rest to lean on – RSI here I come! Not fun.
  Most probably, getting myself a flat screen would help create a bit more space, but that’s gonna be a while off yet as I’d rather wait until I have enough cash to get a big-ass wide flat-screen, mainly because it has more ‘geek penis extension’ power than two normal sized flat screens running as dual-monitors. So, in the meantime, and for general use anyway, I reckon a large desk is the way to go. Of course, with not being here, it doesn’t make too much sense worrying about it now, but it was one thing that occurred to me.
  On the plus side, I recently brightened up my old 15″ CRT Monitor with the addition of some of my – even older – Corinthian All Stars. For those unaware, these are the little charicature-style football players that were around a few years back. I amassed quite a collection and as I was looking through them the other day I decided to pull a few out and line them up along the top of my monitor. I quite like it and may bring more out in the next few days. For now though, here’s what I have:
  
• Drunken Purchase
  I was in Newcastle for a night last week with Mike. Obviously, that night we went out for a few beverages before going back to his.
  Mike’s house has wireless internet access. I was wasted. I had my laptop with me. Between the three of them, they made a bad combination, primarily as I woke up the next morning (ok, afternoon) to see in my inbox that I had confirmation that I was the ‘highest bidder’ on a picture… Not good.
  Fortunately, I had bid on an item that I’d been looking at when it had been posted previously, so at least it was on something that I liked, and it wasn’t too expensive, although it was money I could have spent elsewhere. Here’s what it looks like, seeing as it has since arrived (yes, I ‘won’ the auction) and is hung on the wall:
  
  Now, whether you like it or not, the saddest part of its erection (easy there, it’s not a penis reference) is that with it going up, Paul Ince had to come down. I am currently working out a suitable new location for the Guvn’r, who was understandably upset to lose a position he has held for at least 10 years. Don’t worry though, he still features in the team’s plans.
• Weather
  The weather at the minute is, in a word, bollocks. The last couple of days had some nice moments which, due to various prior engagements I didn’t manage to make the most of, but today and last night had horrible weather – lots of wind, near horizontal rain: FUN!

Computers

• Reconfiguring Smoothwall
  One of the tasks I set myself whilst I wasn’t getting any sleep was that of reconfiguring my Smoothwall setup on moenia at home. moenia, as the name suggests, is the firewall box on the home network, also at the minute doubling as the DHCP and DNS server, and a general gateway to the outside world.
  Previously, through lack of a spare network card and time / energy / desire to do it, the [real:ppl] Server has sat behind the firewall on my local network (Green Zone) with the routing simply punched through to it for the required ports through moenia. After researching things a bit more I figured it was time for a change and time to try and secure it a bit more by trying my hand at setting up a DMZ (Orange Network in Smoothwall) for the web server.
  In all honesty I was surprised at how easy it was, although it took a couple of re-reads of the manual and the similar forum posts before I realized quite how I needed to setup the DNS servers on the Server itself to gain it external access. The nice thing now though is that it’s back up and running (as you can see…) and I can actually access it using the external address, which saves a lot of the problems I used to have.
  My only remaining problem is working out the location (physical and virtual) of the local network server (onerus) which I haven’t decided upon yet, so currently that has to stay offline.
• SATA Blues
  Finally decided to install the new 200Gb Hard Drive that I bought a few months back, mainly because it was cheap, into my main Desktop machine, to give me a bit more space mainly for music and videos as a backup. Problem is, it’s an SATA drive, and my primary one is ATA. Not really being at the forefront of knowing what the compatability would be like and the ease of setup, I just whacked it in and hoped for the best, attaching it to the first SATA connection. Turns out it wouldn’t detect in either WinXp or Ubuntu. So looks like I need to go back to moving that around a bit more and seeing if I can get it working – or I have to leave it until I next build a new PC which is a bit of a bitch…
• New Website
  Having fixed the gateway / network issues I’ve started to work towards a slight change in the blog by running with a Drupal CMS as the basis to help me tie everything in a little bit nicer. In the meantime though the blog will stay in the same place, and I’ll just double-post everything whilst I transfer the older posts into Drupal.
  The main reason I chose Drupal over Joomla which I was trying previously is that from what I’ve looked at Drupal seems to cater more comfortably to the small, primarily Blog-driven approach that I want to go for with the site, along with fairly easy integration of Gallery2, or a fairly usable Drupal Gallery if all else fails.
  It is fairly different in its setup as a CMS when compared to Joomla, but it seems fairly useful and easy to get to grips with, so far anyway. Tonight’s task is reinstalling the Gallery and trying to get that setup properly. Soon see how that works out though.
• EvE Online
  This stretch of time at home has seen me play a good amount of Eve Online and actually manage to spend enough time to get some really solid playing done and get my characters to a fairly comfortable level in terms of setting them up for new stuff.
  No doubt many people will wonder what the hell Eve’s all about and the simple truth is if you haven’t tried it I doubt you can appreciate it. To try and explain what it is is difficult, but once you get playing it becomes extremely immersive and addictive and keeps you coming back to it. Lot of fun.
• Return of th’Ubuntu?
  The last few weeks I’ve been running Debian Etch as my OS of choice on the PowerBook, after going through some difficulties with updates, reinstalls, then re-updates of Kubuntu trying to move from 6.06 to 6.10, the main difficultie being that for some reason 6.10 seemed to struggle with remembering Gamma settings on the monitor, reason unknown. Basically if I went through the display settings when I logged in and tweaked the settings in any minor way, then hit apply, the monitor would go back to showing the actual colours on the pictures, desktop, fonts etc, rather than being all pixely and, well, wrong.
  So I tried plain Debian. And I have to say I have been very impressed. The updates are daily and work without a charm and everything seems to just work pretty damn well. All that is except the keyboard which, although it types quite well (I’m typing this in it now) it randomly ‘jumps’ to another point in the document / sentence / paragraph apparently at random and with no consistency. This can prove to be very frustrating, and confusing as I never had this issue in any other Distro I’ve used (even going back to Ubuntu 5.04 or YellowDog Linux 3.0). I mean, it’s manageable, but when writing longer pieces like this it gets frustrating having to undo things every time it does it and going back to finding my spot as well as occasionally making instant messaging posts illegible. So it’s basically something I don’t want to have to manage.
  Of course, I could just go back to using Mac OS X, but I really don’t enjoy it as much.
  So I’m thinking of going back. Sat in the CD Drive right now is the freshly burned Ubuntu (no KDE) 6.10 (the Edgy Eft) CD, ready to go if I feel like doing the deed. Problem is, I’m not sure if I really want to or not. Part of me wants to just go abck to using KDE still, which means I will have to use 6.06 and take the not-quite-cutting-edge packages for a while until maybe I try Debian again, or the next release of Ubuntu works properly. Of course, I may end up trying 6.10 with the Gnome desktop environment and find the exact same issues, although my little bit of playing when it last happened suggested it was a KDE error – why, I have no idea.
  I also think it would be quite good to get back to using Gnome again. After all, my main reason for using KDE in the first place – the tighter integration with the Amarok music player – is not so much a big deal since the development of Exaile provides all the same functionality designed for the Gnome desktop. More than anything else I think it’s fairly healthy to swap about every now and then, particularly at my low level of knowledge, to try and get a grip on how the different part works, and where they’re similar. I will miss some of the cool Konqueror features though. But we’ll see, I’ll have to write a decent write up when / if I make the change.
• New Laptop?
  Yes, I’m toying with getting myself another laptop, namely an IBM, either a T40, T41, or T42, to have as a more durable option than my PowerBook. Because, despite the PowerBook being a beautiful machine, and one that has served well and taken a fair amount of stick over the last two and a bit years that I’ve owned it, it has taken some knocks a little too easily, the biggest one being the ease with which the power port knocked out of shape, rendering it useless and therefore unchargeable. There’s also the obvious extra troubles with trying to get the Apple Hardware working as smoothly as it’s x86 equivalents under Linux that are a factor, as I’m using Linux more and more it would really be able to have a computer where those ‘little annoyances’ are ironed out. Probably if I manage to get myself the IBM I’ll revert the PowerBook back to pure OS X status, just to keep it ‘looking cool’…
  As to where I’m going to get it from, well, main port of call is eBay. Seeing as I’m after the new machine to be a durable workhorse, I’m not after getting anything new (in which case I’d have to get it through Lenovo now, and the T4x series have, I believe, been discontinued) and shiny, just something that’s hard-wearing and powerful enough for my needs which, looking at the spec I’m probably looking at a 1.5GHz CPU, onboard Intel Wireless Chipset (because it works easily in Linux) and about 512Mb RAM (which is easily upgradable). The biggest drawback is that all the T4x’s seemed to ship with 40Gb hard drives, which I’d have to upgrade so I don’t have to rely on my external drives as much. Having the laptop delivered with XP installed would also be alright, as I could at least then have an Eve Client tucked away inside that and then shrink it down as small as possible… Biggest problem is price, as I’m loathe to spend more than £250 on it. Back to eBay then…

Diving

• North West Emergency Recompression Unit, Murrayfield
  Sunday just gone saw me travel down to the North West Emergency Recompression Unit which is based at the BUPA Murrayfield hospital on the Wirral – but is in itself a NHS facility. I was there as a last minute addition to a trip organized and run by Adam Hanlon and Capernwray Diving & Leisure. Basically the chamber there runs ‘day trips’ whereby groups can go down, sit through an interesting (from a dive perspective) lecture, followed by a ‘Dry Dive’ in the Chamber to a depth of 50m, breathing air.
  Obviously, it would be wrong for me to detail what was mentioned in the lecture, as it would potentially ruin any unexpected statements and comments mentioned, but it was well presented, with charisma, although I don’t know if I quite buy all the lines fed. Was certainly interesting though.
  As for the ‘Dry Dive’, that is a definite must for anyone who still believes narcosis is a myth – or worse, that they can ‘handle’ it – and for anyone who just fancies a good laugh. Some very funny moments for both sides.
  So, apologies that isn’t more detailed, but an excellent day out, and thanks to Adam for organising it all, and for ‘changing the route’ so we would get to see the Sub…
• Drysuit Since I was going down to the Wirral anyway, it proved a perfect time for me to run my drysuit down to Protec in Wallasey. Really, I should have taken this down ages ago, but it’s a bit of a roundabout route if I’m not going anywhere remotely close… Still, at least it’s there now so I would imagine it’ll be done and ready by the time I get back from Slovakia so if I’m still not working, I can at least try and get a good amount of diving in! As far as what the suit needs (because I know you’re dying to find out), it’s basically in for a zip replacement, as the old zip had started to wear and leak mildly in places, and for seal replacements whilst it’s there. Which is reasonable enough. Most probably I will be leaving this suit home when I next go back out to Egypt as I have the Diving Concepts suit already on the boat, and it’ll be nice to not have to cart the damn drysuit bag with me everytime I head home . Obvious downside is that I won’t have my drygloves out in Egypt now, at least not without buying another pair…
• Diving in General
  Haven’t done enough of it (2 Dives since back).
  Simply not good enough. Must try harder.

Self

• Not in the Eyes
  I’ve realised in the past few days a major factor I’m lacking in general conversation: I find it difficult to hold a look at other people’s eyes during conversation, even on a topic I’m comfortable with. It seems to happen less with mates and people I know particularly well, but with strangers, and certainly strangers who are a few years older than me, I’ve become extremely aware of it.
  And it bothers me. Because I shouldn’t be like that. There’s no reason for it. No justification. I guess it comes down to nerves or some form of insecurity that I’m unaware of. But it’s annoying. So, please, don’t be alarmed if I appear to be looking extremely intent when I’m next talking to you, it’s more than likely I’m simply trying to concentrate on holding your eye contact (not lens) and to that end I may miss some parts of conversation. My bad.
• No Sleep ’til Belfast
  The last few weeks my sleep pattern has been, at best, nocturnal. But, I reckon it’s fair to say that the last few days shifted it into the realms of ‘fucked up’.
  Basically, with having no work to do and generally finding myself more active later on at night, I shifted from going to bed at ‘conventional’ times to going to bed in the early hours of the morning and using the rest of the night time to mess with computers, read, and generally be awake. The last few days though knocked all this by things turning up to do in the mornings, leaving me largely without sleep for more than a day. Maybe not a big deal in itself, but with things to do it means I’m now on my third such day this week, leaving very little recuperation time in between. I think I may well go sleep for a little while after I finish writing this. Not yet sure quite how long such a system will continue for… time will tell!
• Political Compass
  So, I retook the Political Compass Test again today, the first time I’ve taken it in a few years. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what my ’score’ was last time, but I know it was fairly firmly in the Libetarian Left section of the graph, and things haven’t really changed that much in that time.
  The Compass itself is quite an interesting idea as it attempts to dispell these theories of ’simple left and right’ by plotting on two axies. I can’t really explain it too well, and won’t try to, have a look at the site and the explanation is a lot clearer.
  It also features a rough plot as to where various world leaders and figures would lie on the graph, according to answering the questions by what they did / said publicly (I don’t think Gandhi actually took the test…). Back in the good old days I’m sure it used to plot your result on the graph along with the world figures, but now it seems you have to make that mental leap yourself. Times are hard, clearly.
  Anyway, as for how I did, well I scored an Economic Left / Right of -7.25 and a Social Libetarian / Authoritarian of -6.87 which fairly well buries me in the bottom left portion of the graph. It’s actually a tad lower-left than I had expected, but quite interesting to find out. See how you do. Enjoy.

And that’s it! That’s all I had to say. Apologies for my length…

The HEPCA teams were divided into two diving teams, diving single tanks of air, which alternated in short bottom time dives to recover the boxes. The RSE team ran two back-to-back dives diving 25/25 backgas in double AL80s (and one AL80 bottom stage) and carrying deco bottles of EANx50 and Oxygen. Maximum depth to the sea bed was 39m, making 25/25 an ideal gas for providing all the benefits of Helium and a safe working PPO2 of  1.2 at the absolute maximum depth. Considering the physical exertion involved, this really helps. Of course, it’s also easier to blend than 30/30 as it’s just the Helium plus EANx32 (like the other Standard Gases we dive…). But enough on the details, what about the dives?

Given the nature of the operation, unfortunately I can only be minimal on the details as far as the location and the like goes, and dropping down to the sea bed we had only the HEPCA divers information on what to expect, which was basically a lot of boxes (around 20) spread across the reef. The ammunition we were collecting were for small arms, so not too much to worry about. Our first dives intentions were primarily to film and document HEPCA’s operations, but we ended up getting in the water as the first team was getting out, so we decided to start lifting ourselves (I will try to upload some of the not-so-exciting video at a later date). No idea on dates, no idea on origins (there are no known wrecks in the area).
Unfortunately, we were also without our scooters for this dive, which were out on rent.
The first thing that struck me as we followed the shot down to the sea bed was just what a perfect placement the HEPCA team had secured with their shot line – a quick glance around showed at least 10 boxes in the close vicinity of the shot line.

As Faisal is more proficient with his knots than I, it was decided he would run the lifting process, with me helping out and filming where necessary. Given the excellent visibility and vicinity of the shot line (within 10m at all times) we decided to make life easier and ropped the O2 deco tanks next to the line, whilst I carried both of our Nitrox 50s on the leash so they were out of the way. Having not planned to lift before we dropped in, we didn’t carry sacrificial air stages for inflation of the lift bags. This gave us less bottom time than we could have otherwise managed, although with the depths as shallow as they were it wasn’t too much of a hinderence.

For the first dive we managed a total bottom time of 50 minutes, average depth 36m, for which we did 40minutes of deco and a total run time of 95 minutes. The deco was split between the 21m bottle and the O2. We lifted a total of 10 boxes.

Back onboard we checked out what we had and cleaned up one of the bullets to reveal it date-stamped as manufactured in 1940. Interesting. But no clues as to where they came from.

We refilled with the same gases and jumped back in, this time with an extra couple of air tanks to aid the inflation. No camera this time. We had a total surface time of 55 minutes. During this dive we lifted 4 more boxes before calling it a day. Same depth, bottom time 40 minutes, with 30 minutes deco. Total Run Time was 77 minutes. Back on board we repacked everything and set off back to port where the Coastguard removed the ammo presumably to do their own investigative work on it.

And that was that.

As far as personal opinions go, I found it pretty fun to get the chance to be involved with something like this and to see roughly how things are set up and run. And it was fun to do extended bottom times in the 30m range like this. Certainly there were new things / tips / tricks that I learned from watching the setup and that we can hopefully apply to other projects in the future, as well as maybe organising a search for a wreck in the area if it seems feasible.

I’m also really interested to find out what happened to have the ammo there in the first place, but we’ll see about that in time.

I received my new Diving Concepts Z-Flex (Size: ML with minor modifications) 3 days ago now, and so have completed nearly the first 10 dives with it, and ample amount of time to judge a fair opinion on a new suit.

First thing to say about the suit is that the legs are maybe half an inch too short – which is my fault, by the way, I should have ordered longer but underestimated. Stood upright they’re fine, but with legs up and arched, they’re a tad short – but more than workable.

Considering the ‘Made in Chain’ stamp, the suits are remarkably well constructed by Dry Suit standards, although the standard CEJN inflator fitting over the standard International Sitec fitting is questionable, but apparently common amongst manufacturers, as is the low profile Apeks dump on the shoulder (again, becoming more and more popular with manufacturers, but easily changeable.

In the water the suit is just as good (although not better) as my Protec Explorer (admittedly, that is made to measure). For an off-the-peg style suit I doubt you could hope for better, especially if you bear my characteristics (fairly long, lanky, skinny, dweeb). Flexibility throughout the suit is good, the knee pads are nice although I suspect the material will soon snag and look tatty as opposed to scuffing.

My only drawbacks with the suit lies with the boots and the crotch strap.
First, the crotch strap – why don’t I like it? Well, mainly because it doesn’t work. Sure it is a nice choice of crotch strap material (if a tad flimsy) but the adjustment mechanism sucks, plain and simple. The connection to the fold at the back also leaves me wondering exactly how it was designed that way.
Secondly, the boots. First, I must say I find the style of boot fine and adjustable to all kinds of diving, whether you have the luxury of walking over soft sand of a smooth boat platform, or whether you have to scramble over rocky outcrops to get to and from your dive site. However, these particular boots I find have simply too tall a sole, and an extremely awkward inner seam right where my toe connects to the end of the boot.
I noticed this when diving a similar Diving Concepts Z-Flex but with a smaller boot a while ago and put it down to too small a boot (which was undoubtedly the case, but have since found a similar issue in my more-than-adequate larger boots. The main difference being that the pain
is uncomfortable as opposed to agonising in the new suit.
I have yet to see how it fares for longer dives, but I’m sure it is fine (bear in mind I am only wearing thin socks this week).

Like I said, overall impressions for an off-the-peg suit such as this are a resounding thumbs up, but I guess I was spoilt by my (now resident UK) Protec suit!