By Piers Boileau-Goad
25th June 2023
This week I am diving in Croatia off MV Vranjak 1, a purpose built specifically for the needs of divers. Vranjak I offers diving tours, technical diving tours, ordinary cruising and biking tours.The name Vranjak has been a synonym for high quality diving in Croatia since 1991.
Dive 3: Soko
Having skipped the morning dive to help with compressor problems, helping everyone else into the water, then out, as well as offgassing more from the previous days short dives, the afternoon dive was intended to make up for it. And make up for it I did.
I was first in at 15:16. Enveloped by clear, blue water with nothing below for 5 or 6 metres. I waited for Simon to jump in. When viewed from the water, I always find the bubbles created by a diver entering the water rather pretty. Prettiness aside, we headed forward to the ‘shotline’ area and submerged along the way, meeting a shelf of sea grass and soft corals. Heading to our left, we follow the rocks on our right shoulder and kept finning, seemingly common by now, against the current. I could feel my Oxygen cylinder emptying more rapidly than I would have liked but Simon was finning powerfully ahead, seemingly with ease. After five or six minutes of finning we reached a small drop off. I estimated the bottom to be at about 50m which meant a drop of 30m as we had descended to about 18 or 19m by this stage. The blue was on our left, with the rocks amongst the blue below…down we went. The rock outcrops on our right suddenly became mountainous walls covered in various corals of all colours, inhabited by lots of small fish of multitude colours and kinds (lots of small blue/yellow ones). Heading across the base of the wall I found myself at 43.4m where we spent the next 25 minutes finning around the base looking for a tasty crustacean for supper! We found one soon enough but he was adamant about staying in his little cave, sadly he won so we moved on and looked for a new supper dish.
We found one a few minutes later, unfortunately he was not so keen on getting into our bag so managed to escape once, but not the second time! In he went. Finning along the wall at 43m we didn’t find any other meals so we decided to let this one go. Getting to the end of the wall after about 25 minutes or so we started an ascent to 35m and headed back along it, headed back towards the boat. Not many crustaceans but lots of fish, (more blue and yellow ones) and a good number of yellow, blue and red soft corals we slowly ascended up to 9m where we had a few minutes of deco to complete, most of which had cleared as we ascended.
At this point we saw some of our fellow guests finning a little too vertically and kicking up the coral rather badly. Still, it could be worse..
Keeping the rocks on our left this time, we headed back towards the shot lone area for our last deco stop at 6m for 4 minutes.
The recreational divers now leaving the water means its easier for us to exit. With Simon’s deco cleared he heads up, leaving me on a few minutes longer for three extra minutes at 3m. No bag required, the boat is right above me and I’m bobbing up and down in the growing sea. It wasn’t the best stop I’ve ever done, but without a bag, it was harder than it should have been. Could I have bagged up, yes…but frankly I couldn’t be bothered. It was gorgeous, I was warm and very happy hanging in mid water.
Surfacing a few metres from the boat, I head to the ladder, whip off my bailouts, fins and pump up my O2 to a little over one bar. Climbing up the ladder, I had a massive grin on my face. What a lovely dive that was! I’m definitely up for doing it again!
I’m struggling to get my download so the information I have comes from my back up computer:
- Dive time: 84 minutes.
- Max depth: 43m.
- Gas Mix: 18/65
- O’Dive Score: 100
Dive 4: Stuka (Ju-52)
At 11:12 we jump in, laden with two stages for myself and two on Simon. Still, once again, the blue water was sheer bliss. All the recreational divers had jumped in before us which allowed us to have more space on the dive deck to kit up and faff around. It did get a little hot under that 30 degree sun and weight of the cylinders so getting in was pure heaven.
As we descended, we could make out the Stuka on the bottom from about 12 metres onwards, so departing from the line at 20m we headed over towards the wreck for a closer inspection. The engine had been thrown (or perhaps intentionally moved) about 5m ahead of the wreck so we couldn’t find the propellor either. Nevertheless, it was surreal being this close to such a historically infamous aircraft. Swimming around it, we saw the flaps set for landing which always brings the personal history home to me, thinking of some twenty something pilot fighting to survive.
Finding myself peering into the aft cockpit where the gunner was I was hoping to see some empty cases in the footwells but sadly nothing was to be found. What was interesting however were the number of holes in the fuselage and wings. Were these all battle damage or were they from the ravages of time? It was at this time that Simon decided it was time to get some skills done so started showing me some queue cards. A mask loss was the first to be done, ideally neutrally buoyant but if necessary it was possible to use something to assist. Done, not perfectly but I didn’t need anything to assist me, my biggest problem is heavy self evaluation. Next up was a diluent flush (pumping diluent through my system to check on the cells and identify any which are not working properly) which was a little messier due to huge changes in buoyancy from the loop from venting through the nose and then squirting new gas in. This test uses large volumes of gas so its best not to do it too often when you only use 2 litre cylinders! Finally we did some stage handling which was actually not too bad at all given that I’ve not done this for a good 7 months. With these three basic skills done, we headed back to the bottom of the line and I prepared my SMB for release, venting my loop as it got fuller so I could really fill it instead of it arriving at the surface a bit limp. Don’t you just hate a limp SMB?
From minute 40 we were heading up, firstly up to 18 where there was a brief stop before carrying on to 9m for 2 minutes followed by the last stop (we didn’t need a stop at 15 as this had been cleared already), 17minutes at 6m. Here we cheated a little bit by, increasing our PO2 to a set point of 1.5 which meant that we were now breathing 93% O2 to really get the Nitrogen out of the system nice and rapidly. With a water temperature of 21 degrees it was hard to get cold here, I was enjoying the warmth it must be said. Finally, after 64 minutes, we broke the surface and the dive was over, emerging back into the sun to see the boat less then 10m away bearing down on us to retrieve the last two in the water. ‘Home’ for tea and medals!
We decided to skip the afternoon dive as we want to avoid pushing things for tomorrows dive a little deeper, however, lets see what the weather gods say first…
Dive 5: Balan
At 10:00 both Simon and I were ready to go, both of us laden down with kit, waiting on the dive step (I would call it the transom but sure there is a special word for it) for the signal to jump. Simon went in gracefully with a negative entry, I however tried to shuffle to the edge so I could get a decent stride in and ended up slipping into the water rather ungracefully. Falling might be the most apt adjective for my entry. Still, down we both went to secure the SMB marking the start and finish point for all the divers to use as a reference. My dive officially started at 10:05.
We tried for five minutes to tie the SMB into a decent point for everyone to use, this obviously consumed our bottom time before we had even started our descent to the planned depth. Nevertheless, at 10:10 we finally started our way down, it felt like falling into a blue void, passing the fish and soft squidgy stuff as we went, 20m, 30m, 40m, 50m and now the bottom is in sight, down we went, 60m, 70m and now starting to slow the descent. As we reached 75m we were about to expend our last few minutes of bottom time so we elected to head back in spite of not reaching our planned depth of 80-85m. With a bit of deco racking up quite fast, we ascended steadily to our first stop at 48m where we were supposed to have 1 minute. Next was 45m, then at increments of 3m we had stops all the way to 6m. Stops didn’t start to lengthen more than a few minutes until 9m when we had a stop for 9 minutes before stopped at 6m for 55 minutes.
We had a planned bailout gas set up of 15/54 for the deep bailout from 85m to 63m, 21/33 as an intermediate from 63m to 21m followed by 50% until surfacing. We did not carry enough gas to comply with the rule of thirds individually but at this sort of depth, the team bailout mentality is very much in force. You consume from one bailout until one third is consumed, then you pass off the stage and receive the ‘donated’ stage which you again would consume a third of, then repeat the process so that you consume one third of the cylinder before passing it off to another diver. Had we needed to bailout this would have been our plan as we, together, had more than enough gas to bring one and a half divers to the surface.
We came up the wall, which we had followed down so had plenty of things to look at. At one stage I was rather transfixed by a little tube thing which had an white umbrella thing coming out of the end of it. As I approached, this umbrella shot back inside the tube. I actually remember thinking at this stage that Tom Bryer would have loved this. It was probably only at 15 or 18m so easily reachable for anyone. At another stage of the ascent we saw a school of perhaps 30 or 40 blue fish bumbling around about 5m off the wall which was pretty cool but I think this was a little deeper at 40m or so. As we reached the shallower stops, we finally passed over the top of the wall and had a flat surface to use as a reference. I think this was roughly 9m. I increased my set point to 1.5 so I was now breathing roughly 80% O2 helping with the off gassing.
I had been re arranging the three stages I was carrying around my body, throughout the dive as we passed the switch depths so by the time we passed over onto the top of the wall my deep mix was out of the way behind me on the right leaving me with the shallow and intermediate bailout on my left. Off came the intermediate and went behind me, leaving me now with easy access to only the shallow bailout meaning that I could not, at this stage, take a hypoxic cylinder without a bit of effort.
For the rest of the dive, we stayed on top of the wall floating along over to the SMB that we had placed at the start of the dive, from which we could now see the shadow of the boat on the surface waiting for us. Making our way over to the boat, we had something like 30 or 40 minutes of deco left so we used this to do some stage drills, dropping them, passing them off to each other so that we went from three stages to none and then back again. Something to remember is that when you pick up or drop off a stage your buoyancy will change depending on whats in the tank, helium? Air? 50%? So this gave us a few minutes of activity before the remainder of the deco was done. I remember watching a little hermit crab moving very slowly over the top of a rock, rather I didn’t see the crab, merely a ‘stone’ moving very slowly and in stages which was interesting to watch. The fish were getting very close to us at this stage, more of them and our lack of bubbles meant that we could have merged with the school.
The recreational divers came passed us at thus point so the fish decided to vacate the premises. Naturally Simon indicates that he would love to use the lavatory so I tell him I have used it more than once already and that he should stay a way as the water would be warmer near me for a few minutes.
After 100 minutes in the water Simon says that he is going to head up so I debated whether I would stay for a further 20 minutes or simply head up after. I decided on the latter but dropped my PO2 to 1 bar momentarily, watching and waiting for the other divers and then Simon to finish on the ladder. Heading up slowly it seemed to have taken forever, but in reality it was only one minute from 3metres until I broke the surface with one stage ready to hand up to the deck hands, followed by the other two in short order. Increasing PO2 once again up to 1 bar (it had dropped to 0.6 on surfacing) for my climb up the ladder, I took my time, breathing as much O2 as I could. Getitng out of the water was lovely but I would have rather stayed longer at 75 or pressed further to 80m. Next time!
- Dive time: 108 minutes.
- Max depth: 76m.
- Gas mix: 10/60 plus 3 x Bailout stages – 15/54, 21/33 and 50% in Ali 80’s.
- O’Dive score: 68 which was not so good.
- Lessons learnt: It seems that up to around 30/50m I can probably get away with 45/70 as a gradient factor but when I’m going deeper, it might be better to use a lower GF High.
Dive 6
At 15:48, after the recreational divers had jumped into the water, both Simon and I splashed in. This was not supposed to be anything but a bit of a skills and SMB recovery dive, hence the max depth was a shallow 27m with a total dive time of 36 minutes. Probably one of the shortest dives I have done for a while.
I started the dive with only 80 bar of O2 and about 111 bar of diluent. This was more than enough as I am using roughly 0.8 bar of O2 per minute (1.6 litres), hence, 80 bar would have lasted 100 minutes, plus I had a 50% mix with me as a bailout which could have been plugged in should something go dramatically wrong.
The skills during the dive were ‘Hyperoxic’ and ‘Hypoxic’ which were performed on the wall we came up on that morning. It was a little awkward doing a diluent flush (with associated buoyancy issues venting and then refilling my loop) but both drills went well. Of course, if, or rather when, something is going to go wrong, it will not be on a flat bit of sand, it will be in the most inconvenient place possible so why not ‘train hard’ and ‘fight easy’ to coin a phrase.
After messing around with these we ascended up to the top of the wall and made our way back to the boat
One thing I am finding is that someone lovely individual in the pee valve condom catheter factory is really going heavy with the superglue. Its enough to make your eyes water!
- Dive time: 35 minutes.
- Max Depth: 24.3
- O’Dive score: 97!
