Dive your plan -- Finally succeeding

Yesterday, I finally managed to “plan my dive and -where I normally failed- dive my plan”.

This was my first Monday-evening dive with divearound.com. I recently joined this quite active team to have a new experience in what this team thing is all about. We had 8 members of the team joining this time. Although most of us live quite close to Tynaarlo, not many had experience in diving there. I ended up with two trainee dive masters as buddies, while the other five were diving as a group.

The initial plan was to go from north thru west and do the quite famous crayfish wall. But with eight divers doing the same thing I felt that we would end up being a complex incoherent mess-up of divers all going about in different directions while trying to all end up at the wall. After getting our gear ready, my buddies and I decided to split off of the big group and go east instead of west. We planned to go to the first platform, second platform, to the wreck and then move to a new crayfish wall starting to develop there and then return.

We entered the murky, milky water, first meters where more based on feel than on sight.. and it stayed that way throughout the dive, as we soon discovered. As I was the only one with dives logged here, in our buddy-team, I ended up in lead position. I set out to a depth of 5 m and headed east. By sheer luck we stumbled upon the first platform.. first waypoint successfully navigated, we followed the line to the second platform, easy. Visibility was so very poor that it was hard to see where the deck was. As a consequence, by holding the line, we ended up going underneath the platform and out the other side. Just away from that location we found a small pike of about 25 to 30 cm, the first life that was worth noting. We moved to 4 meter and, again with lots of luck, found “Juweeltje” (small boat, nothing special). After checking out the crayfish underneath and in the boat we went to the new crayfish wall to find some nice holes and crayfish, again.

We returned to 5.5 meter and moved north again, finding the second platform and from there the first platform, returned after 50 minutes having done a great, relaxed dive and executing the plan exactly as intended.

Thanks buddies!