Two of the club's divers head off to Vobster Quay for an early(ish) season splash.

7:30am on a Sunday is early at the best of times, but if you stay up 'til 2ish preping your new twinset for its first splash, it's especially early. Anyway, off we go to Somerset.

With perfect overwater navigation, Vobster is found and a lower car parking space is secured (phew). A quick coffee was taken before getting everything together. It was amazing how many people were walking around and jumping in the water with wetsuits on. The water was measuring in at 6 degrees, wearing a wetsuit must be painful for anything over a couple of minutes!

Well, it must be true about drysuits shrinking over the winter because it was a struggle getting the zip closed.... But then again I'm pretty sure I haven't grown up physically or any other way, so maybe neoprene does shrink. Either way, a new suit may be in order.

Finally got into the new twinset harness, I think it might be a bit tight. There's no way I'd be able to do a shutdown, I couldn't even reach my drysuit dump valve! We jumped in and went for a little float around.

Underwater navigation was a little less capable than the land based equivalent; I thought we were heading right towards the airplane bits but the first thing we found was the boat you end up at if you go straight out. After that, we headed off to the right properly this time.

At the deeper parts, the visibility dropped right off. At one stage my torch wasn't being much use, I could feel my fins on the bottom but couldn't see it, less than a metre vis. Everywhere else was much better, 2, 3, 4 metres maybe.

The old dive profile below shows a little bit of a hiccup; you can see at around 25 minutes where I set off my SMB. I thought I was doing a good job (it's a crack bottle one, how hard can it be??!!) but the line wrapped around the reel handle and off I went upwards. I got it freed but in all honesty, I should have let it go. Lesson hopefully learned.

Made it back ashore, I like my twins! Need a bit of adjustment on the harness then they'll be good.

Now: drysuit...... There was a nice chap from DUI at Vobster and his wares were very tempting. Very nice suits! It's at times like those when I wish I was a banker, one bonus payment would nearly cover the cost of a nice new suit! I'll start saving the pennies and see how close to a DUI I can get.