The 'Dee Why', Long Reef, Sydney.

Today I dived the Dee Why wreck off Long Reef out of 'Pacific Coast Diver 1'. This dive was mostly to check out my setup for deeper dives and to see if my new drysuit seal was fixed. I rigged my gear as I will for my upcoming trip to Tasmania where we will be diving between 75 and 90m. The set up was twin 88cf tanks on the back and a 15cf pony bottle side mounted. I carried heliox 10, air and O2.

The sea was quite rough with a southerly swell blowing up over night. The visibility was great for the first 15m but was poor on the wreck. We were anchored near the bow which has collapsed since the last time I dived here over 12 months ago. I checked my PO2 and looked for any bubbles (leaks) then headed off towards the stern. The whole wreck is deteriorating badly but I swam inside one of the rear holds. There were lots of fish inside the wreck and having the RB was great as they didn't swim away, the lack off any bubbles was a blessing too as I looked up to see the roof was in very poor condition and ready to collapse at any time. I would not have swam in here if I was on OC as the bubbles could have brought the whole lot down.

I went up top of the wreck and worked my way back towards the bow. I noticed that there was no CO2 or WOB build up at all on this dive as there had been on the previous dives and I would put this down to the new shut off mouthpiece I was using which has much thinner one way valves thus less breathing resistance. I swam inside the boiler room and returned to the bow as the other divers were leaving the bottom. A few minutes later my 20 mins was up so I pulled the anchor and began my ascent. It was great not to have any worries about gas supplies however the boat driver had asked me to keep my inwater time reasonable so I figured 20mins was enough which would give me a total time of 50mins underwater.

I did all my deep stops and when I got to 21m I unplugged my drysuit and plugged the air into my diluent side bag and flushed through. At 6m I found it hard to get a PO2 of 1.6, because of the O2 reservoir which only adds a bit of O2 at a time It was hard to flush all the inert gas from the loop so I did most of my 6m stop at about 8m.

With 10mins left of deco I decided to test my shut off mouth piece and went to OC for a minute. The mouthpiece worked perfectly with no leaks at all, however.....
When I went back to the breather I had a lung full of OC gas and combined with the gas already in the loop it made me suddenly very bouyant. Madly exhaling and dumping from my drysuit didn't help and I was on the surface in a few seconds. Doh! Oh well, something to think about next time. I descended back to 6m and completed my deco.

At the end of the deco I thought I saw what was a dolphin at the limit of my visibility but I wasn't sure. When I surfaced I found out that there had indeed been dolphins close to the boat just before I came up. Too bad they didn't come in closer. This was a good dive, but any dive you walk away from on a CCR can be considered good, I learn't a few lessons and got to try out a few new things. I was very happy with the way the unit performed and now feel confident in taking it to dive deep in Tassy.

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Last updated 1998 by Scott Leimroth ©