Sue's River Leven BSAC bash

A number of JBOD divers joined lots of divers from other regional clubs to dive the River Leven in an event organised by Sue from Potteries Divers. Unlike the recent Christmas dive at the same site the river was in flood as Storm Doris had just passed through. This meant the drift would be much faster! Although the meander looked like it had a whirlpool in it...

John cleverly volunteered to be one of the first clubs in as we live the closest to the site. In practice this meant an early start as well as bumping over the non-return flaps at the entrance to Fell Foot park. After much chat, shuffling of cars to the exit point and kitting up JBOD's divers were arranged in buddy pairs and went into the stream leaving Mark to count them back in at the other end. Alistair and Amelia lead the way followed by Anton and Alan with John and Quentin following. In practice none of the buddy pairs saw anyone else from JBOD again until the end as the current was quite fast.

After a good while Alistair and Amelia became suspicious having seen what looked like the same pile of dumped crockery followed by a distinctive groove in the river bed. A judicious look at the surface confirmed that they'd spent half an hour in the meander's whirlpool! A bit of strong finning got them out of the whirlpool and off into the very fast stream again.

Alistair and Amelia got out of the water after an hour. The rest of the buddy pairs took around forty minutes to complete the course. Apparently the rescue boat had been alerted and people were starting to wonder if they'd missed the exit and gone over the weir. The only danger Alistair was in was frost bite as his fingers were cold; Amelia was fine as she had her new underwater mitts on. After de-kitting and redressing everyone convened to the Swan Inn for a lovely lunch.

This is an example of a dive that is accessible to all divers in the club as the maximum depth was around 8m. All of the JBOD divers were using standard single tanks.

Many thanks to Sue for organising the event. Also thanks to Mark for shuffling cars and counting us in and out. Thanks to all that came and made it a great time.