Six become five

We all met up last night in the Boat the Rocks, a bar next to Scimitar Diving.  6 of us discussed exactly what we were going to do to get the video shots we needed.  We had a team for lighting, a camera team, and two beautiful models to lay line and look pretty.

On arriving at the dive shop in the morning, I was greeted by a rather sheepish looking diver, who explained to me that he'd taken the three days off work to come on the project, travelled to the UK to attend, and then left all of his dive gear in Bristol.  It's a small oversight, of course, to forget your gear on a dive trip. These things happen. Now we are five.

John lights up a Carley float mounting

The weather was gorgeous. Sunshine, and no wind at all. This is a refreshing change from the norm in the UK, so we (all five of us) were very excited to get onto the wreck. Smudge dropped the shot onto the stern of LST 531 and the new combined video/lighting team descended to get set up.  The shot had landed right on the stern gun tub. We were looking to shoot video on the port side, aft. This made it an easy job to orient ourselves. The visibility was probably between 3-5m, but it was dark as the plankton layers block out most ambient light below about 20m.  We fired up or selection of LED and HID lights, and try to get our eyes in.  Not too bad. John laid a line from the shot to our target area so that Pete and Duncan, who had not dived the wreck before, knew where to go.

Duncan lays line along LST 531

Pete and Duncan approached out of the darkness, lights ablaze and set to work laying line from the port gun tub, past the LCVP and on to the break in the hull. An important job well done.  We did manage to shoot some decent video too, and learned a lot about the positioning of the lights and lighting divers.

All too soon, Pete and Duncan needed to leave, so we bid them farewell and cleaned up the line.  I took the opportunity to shoot a little more video of John doing that, while Paul lit him up from above.

The weather was still nice, 80minutes after descending, and on the way home, we were treated to a display by the Red Arrows. I'm pretty convinced that they came just for us, but others suggested it might have something to do with the Weymouth carnival.  I guess we'll never know.

On our return, number six had returned with a box of dive gear and proclaimed his readiness to dive tomorrow.  The excitement mounts.