Expedition Iron Deep
A TEAM OF 12 FROM THE BRITISH Army recently completed an exped to Cyprus, allowing eight personnel to qualify as BSAC Dive Leaders. Over two weeks, the group completed 188 dives and spent more than 100 hours underwater, enhancing their existing diving skills while also strengthening their mental and physical resilience- the key aim of Military Adventurous Training( AT).
The AT Centre in Dhekelia provided all diving equipment, including compressor
and two 6.5m RIBs. Sitting at the eastern end of the island, the centre is ideally placed for both shore and boat diving on some of Cyprus’ s most iconic sites –
October conditions are near perfect for all types of diving, especially for those used to the UK.
The first four days of shore diving focussed on introducing military divers to BSAC diving procedures as well as completing the skills and rescue training needed for DL. With eight students training simultaneously, this was probably harder for the four instructors than students! Transitioning onto the RIBs, we dived the Elpida, Lamboussa II and Fraggle for the next two days. This allowed students to lead fellow divers and manage diving while increasing our depth to 30m and using nitrox to extend our no stop dive time. The final two days were spent in relative luxury, diving the world-famous Zenobia from a hard boat. All divers were able to depth progress to 40m, accumulate and manage live decompression, and conduct limited wreck penetration of the more open areas of the wreck, a fantastic way to end the exped.
The Exped was a huge success, with five of the 12 personnel‘ crossing over’ from Military Diving to BSAC; it also provided a unique opportunity to learn from each other. The Military divers are now wondering why they still use tables, not computers, and the BSAC divers have a new appreciation for surface swimmers when shore diving.
The exped would like to thank Adrian Collier in BSAC HQ for his administrative support throughout. LT COL KM CAMERON RE, Deputy Commander( SO1 Protect), 25 Close Support Engineer Group
The 60-minute Club
A GROUP OF 14 DIVERS AND THREE non-divers have just come back from six days of diving with Camel Dive School based in Sharm El Sheik. You may think that’ s nothing unusual, but our group of divers represented three BSAC branches all coming together for a great experience.
The diving group was made up of Coventry 58, The Monday Club 2606 and one from the Leicester Underwater Explorers Club 321, all with a whole range of different skills and experience. Some of the group had never dived from a day boat before and used nitrox with awesome underwater viz and sea temperatures in the high 20s.
We had booked a 10 dive package over five days: Two dives a day but up went the shout every day, anyone want to do a third dive, well that was a no-brainer!
There were fish in abundance: one of the
group saw a shark but the consensus from our guides, Farad and Mohamed, was that it was a very large milk fish. In the absence of photographic evidence, the jury is out on that one.
We had two birthdays to celebrate and one of the Coventry group has now qualified as a Sports Diver. Some of the group also did two shore dives, one of which was a night dive. To top off the week six of our divers sneaked in another three at Ras Mohamed on our‘ rest’ day.
From the stats: 200 dives completed, mostly with a maximum time of 60 minutes, some struggled to achieve that at the start of the week but we are all now part of the‘ 60 minute club’ with a total underwater time of 190 hours. DAVE PLUMB, Coventry 58 and the Monday Club
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