Читать книгу Deeper into the Darkness онлайн

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For UK technical diving on wrecks like Pathfinder, where you expect it to be pitch black with often poor, silty visibility in torch beams, each diver also carries a small strobe which is clipped to the downline a few metres above the wreck. The downline itself would be next to impossible to find without it, and doing a free ascent from great depth on a tidal wreck which is known to have many nets snagged on it is not the best idea. But 5–6 strobes flashing away in the darkness can be seen from a long way off. By the end of the bottom time, a diver’s night vision will have kicked in and you often see a fuzzy halo of light from the strobes flashing well in the distance.

On this visit, the skipper having positioned his boat to take account of the tide, he then gave the command for the shotline to be deployed over the side of the boat, intentionally placing the shot on the seabed just off the wreck. Skippers are very sensitive to not dropping weighted shotlines on war graves – particularly on fully munitioned warships like Pathfinder.