The most hilarious dive in history!

Location: Eastern Kings – Type: Shore/Reef wall drop off – Max Depth: 29.9m – Length: 40 mins – Surface: Clear/Night

…MOST HILARIOUS DIVE IN HISTORY!!
1. Lost reef = lay on it! (12m)
2. Buoyant – buddy L holding to stop ascent (28 > 24m)
3. Realised – dumped air – face planted reef (24 > 28m). K caught me! 

The above is the entry from my buddy in my logbook which she took it upon herself to write after the events of, as she puts it, the ‘most hilarious dive in history’.

Just a few days after deciding I wasn’t quite ready to dive Eastern Kings, the tables had turned and I was getting set to give it a go one evening. The reef sits just off Devil’s Point (below the yellow buoy out to the left of the swimming pool) and is essentially a reef wall which drops off to 30 metres on one side and 40 on the other (I’d be sticking with my certified 30 metre limit). You have to dive the site at either high or low water, entering around 20 minutes before, otherwise you face a ropey return to shore battling a strong current in a shipping channel. You can’t use an SMB (because, as mentioned, you’re in a shipping channel) and if you lose your buddy you can’t do the usual minute search and surface (yup, it’s that pesky shipping channel again); you have to follow a bearing of 330 degrees back towards shore and only surface when you get to around the 1.5 metre mark. Not much info to keep in your head then!

There were four of us in the group and I was buddying up with someone who I trust implicitly when it comes to diving. If she hadn’t offered to guide me on my first Kings experience (she’s dived it countless times), I doubt very much I’d have done it yet!

At Kings you follow the sloping bottom down to the reef at around 12 metres and then gradually get to 30 metres by following the wall. Although I knew roughly how the site is shaped, I seemed to forget all of that once we’d got a little way down. I’m still trying to figure out how much weight I need with my new BCD and with a 15 litre cylinder instead of 12 as this was a deep dive I was having problems with my buoyancy. We got to 12 metres and the start of the wall, but not expecting such a drop, I started sliding down the wall. I managed to fall on my back with the cylinder weighting me down and essentially became pinned against the reef wall! At that point I didn’t realise I was on the wall and wasn’t making much of an attempt to right myself. My buddy had to pick me up and turn me round after realising I was getting nowhere fast!

Mishap number one complete and I couldn’t believe the sights that greeted me on the reef. Considering it was so dark, the vis was phenomenal and the colours, and range, of life under torchlight incredible. Just a few metres along the wall we bumped into a gigantic lobster. I’m betting he was about two feet long. He was a classic common red lobster but was shimmering under the lights looking rather pretty. This was the first of many times I wish I’d had my camera but given it was my first dive at the site I wanted to concentrate and as it turned out, it was the right call! Fortunately one of the others in the group had his camera so captured a lot of what we saw (thanks to him for letting me use his pics) though missed this beauty after taking a different path. Instead he met some smaller siblings along the way.



Our lobster was a grander version of this little fella

After the girls played a game of ‘let’s see how quickly Mr Lobster can move when encouraged by the light’ (pretty damn fast actually) we moved on through an array of crabs, spiny squat lobsters, olive squat lobsters, ballan wrasse, pike, tompot, sponges, anemones, starfish…it truly felt like all my Christmases had come at once. I was in awe of my surroundings and squealing like a kid, so much so that I very nearly headbutted a large metal pole sticking out of the sandy bottom along the way.

A very pretty anemone



A devil crab - okay, so that's not his real name (he's a velvet swimming crab) but you can see why!

A scorpion fish

A ballan wrasse

I was still having a few buoyancy problems at this point but nothing too drastic and managed to correct myself a couple of times while my buddy made sure I was in the right place the rest of the time (unbeknown to me until afterwards when she said she’d been holding onto me by the SMB attached to me at times to make sure I stayed in one place). That’s taking the guide role to a whole new level!

It was at 28 metres that the moment that resulted in this post’s title came about. What went wrong I’m still not quite sure, but regardless of that, we came to a point where I started drifting upwards quite quickly. My buddy was behind me and sprang in to action just in time to catch a fin while I was struggling to find my inflator hose to get rid of some air. I’d managed to get my snorkel tangled up with my hose and couldn’t get a hold of the deflate button properly, hence still creeping upwards. Having eventually managed to grab it, my logic was that I’d gone up so fast that I needed to get rid of a lot of air. So I held the button down as long as I could. Bad idea! In the space of a few seconds, I’d gone from my buddy holding my foot while I ‘stood’ vertically in the water above her,  to ditching all of my air, falling four metres, and hanging vertically upside down. All credit to her, my buddy was still holding onto my fin, albeit from a very different angle. As amusing as that sounds in itself, here’s the clincher. What I didn’t realise was that one of the others in the group was directly below us, a few metres down from where my comedy ascent/descent had started, so I’d managed to land head first on top of her, face planting the wall at the same time. As unsuspecting as she was, she did a great job of catching me!

After the drama of that part of the dive, we made our way back to shore a little more gracefully (though I still needed a helping hand). Somewhere near the end as the water was getting shallower I disappeared on up and promptly descended back down. My buddy said she was going to follow then decided I’d come back!

The below graph of my dive profile will give you some idea of my variety of ascents/descents. Generally, the smoother the line, the more controlled your buoyancy was, so you can see from the sharp spikes I was having problems!

Profile logged by my dive computer. Spikes = buoyancy issues!

We surfaced at the end of the steps up to the swimming pool; a perfect bit of navigation from my buddy. My first words: ‘Incredible’, ‘embarrassing’ and ‘what the hell happened there?’. Her first words were incomprehensible through her laughter! My entertainment value is priceless!

We got rid of our kit (I still had to be helped up the steps after the cylinder got ten times heavier out the water) and headed back down to the shore to meet the others. My buddy greeted the diver who I landed on with a shout of ‘nice catch’ while I muttered an apology of sorts!

Despite the various incidents, I’ve no doubt my first Eastern Kings experience was my best dive to date. It may not have been perfect in terms of best practice, but we saw so much, the vis and conditions were amazing, and we laughed until we were close to tears.

At every opportunity while you’re training, PADI literature will tell you that ‘diving is fun’. How right they are!