Xiaogui: Rocky Shore, Poor Visibility, Good Day

Some dives are worth writing about because something happened. This one is worth writing about because nothing did, in two metres of visibility, on a rocky shore, on a day when the S6 was exactly the right machine and the depth rating was never once a consideration. It is the least dramatic log in this collection and possibly the most representative of what owning one of these systems actually looks like week to week.

The entry, and why the small machine won

Rocky shore with a small shore break, so the entry is a step into waist-deep water and a swim out. The S6 came because everything about this site is shallow: nine metres at the deepest point and most of it under five, which is a reef that a longer hose and a heavier machine would add nothing to. Nine metres is inside the S6’s eight-metre rating by a metre at the deepest point of the day and comfortably inside it for the reef we actually worked, which was between three and six.

Two metres, and the hose as an instrument

Two metres is enough visibility to work and not enough to navigate by. What made it a good dive rather than a frustrating one was treating the hose as the instrument it is: keeping a hand on it when the bottom silted up, following it to re-orient, and using the pull to work out which way the float had drifted. Nobody became disoriented, because nobody was trying to hold a compass heading in water where the bottom was the only fixed reference.

What two metres of visibility is actually like

Better than it sounds, for a specific reason: everything you look at is close. The dive becomes macro whether or not you intended it, and the small things that are invisible from three metres away in clear water — nudibranchs on rock, small crustaceans in crevices, juvenile fish using rubble as cover — are the entire content of the site. Four divers would ruin it. One diver on a hose in two metres of water is a comfortable, quiet hour that has nothing to do with the view.

What we would do differently

• Take the small machine for shallow rocky sites. A long hose adds nothing here
• Keep one hand on the hose in anything under three metres of visibility
• Log the entry point precisely; the exit is easy to miss on a featureless shore
• Do not plan a compass heading in two metres. Plan a hose route instead