Читать книгу Into the Abyss. Diving to Adventure in the Liquid World онлайн

11 страница из 133

Equipped with all this new gear, I went on to scrounge or pick up cheaply, the other essential pieces of diving equipment, a torch, dive watch and an old-fashioned capillary depth gauge. This clever yet simple device was the size of a large watch and fitted over your wrist. It had a round face with numbers all the way round. A thin transparent pipe, open at one end, circled the outside of the face – and it worked very simply. The deeper you went, the more the increasing water pressure compressed the air in the thin tube - as it tried to force its way into the open end of the tube. You read your depth from the numbers at the point where the air bubble was compressed to.

Even with all this equipment, under the prevailing club system of the time, it took me about six months before the time came for my first sea dive. Swimming around in the safe confines of the pool environment was one thing – but diving in the sea would be completely new to me.

I drove to Aberdour Beach to the west of Fraserburgh on the north-easternmost corner of Scotland. The regular Sunday dive had been planned as an easy shore dive for the novices like myself coming through the club system.