Castaways Sub-Aqua Club
	A Branch (Branch No 2071) of The British Sub-Aqua Club

The James Eagan Layne

Plymouth

17 July 1999

This was to be my qualification dive to make me the first Club Diver Castaways Sub-Aqua dive club has signed up.

The drive down to Cheddar Gorge to meet with Suzanne and Jake was a quick blat down the M4 from Reading, after waiting for my mate Andy to turn up to give me a lift down there.

Arriving in the Gorge I rang Jake to let him know that we were heading for his local pub (a five-minute walk from his house) and we would be there in about 20 minutes. 40 minutes and a pint of Guinness later, still no Jake or Suzanne. A quick phone call and they soon turned up.

The next morning saw a 6:30 leave to arrive in Plymouth for 8:30, just in time to grab a quick breakfast before sorting the gear for the dive. The breakfast turned out not to be so quick after all, and we were still eating it as we tried to put regulators on bottles on stab jackets, what a mess.

Then came the funny/hard part, depending on what side you were on, me trying to put on my semi dry I brought when I was 17 (I'm now 29) talk about trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot. Not good.

A quick air check had Jake running back up to the dive shop, when he discovered his cylinder must have leaked, and he only had 100 bar left. A quick air fill later had us on the rib and heading for the James.

7 miles later.

Weaving amongst the other boats as we tried to get near the James we dropped the shot line onto the top of the wreck. Bullseye!

We finally made it into the water at 10:44 we then headed down the shot line and round to the bow of the ship, where the current was pushing us back, so not to argue with mother nature we went back to the shot, then up and over the rail into the middle of the ship.

Whilst looking round various holes and holds, I managed to find a brass tap, much to the annoyance of Suzanne. Up the shot line 40 mins later and up on to the rib, then the cold trip back to the shore.

On arriving back we unloaded the boat and found Andy fast asleep across the front seats of his car. After taking the cylinders to the dive shop for filling a spot of lunch and finding out what time the second dive was supposed to leave, we all managed to fall asleep in the cars. The second dive was meant to leave the harbour about 3:30 but at ten to three the skipper passed the cars saying he was leaving in 10 minutes. Talk about a mad rush, trying to gather the cylinders from the dive shop, fit the kit back together, and squeeze myself back into a small, damp, wet suit.

The second dive on the James was the same sort of mad scramble for position over the wreck, but the skipper managed to place the shot in almost the same place as the first dive. On arriving at the bottom of the shot line, we gathered ourselves together and headed through the ship. About two minutes into the dive I found a corroded axe head on the bottom, but as it was very corroded I decided that I would leave it there.

As we were going round the wreck with Suzanne photographing almost everything in sight, the three of us managed to spread out a bit, with Jake swimming between me looking in all the holes and Suzanne with her nose pressed up against the hull taking pictures. When we all managed to get back together again, we came round a corner and saw a John Dory feeding around a bit of pipe wreckage, you could almost see the big grin from Suzanne as she was madly photographing the John Dory from every angle. It got a bit mad at us and swam off in the end. The ascent passed without hitch with a stop for three minutes at six meters.

John Dory

This is a large ship, with lots of places for me to explore, after these two dives I think I will be an explorer type of diver, not a photo diver.

These two dives finally completed my training to be a club diver, something I have been meaning to do for a number of years now making me a very happy person.

Dave Roper

Photograph courtesy Suzanne Easton