In some of the Toads
there is a part of them that wants to take them to places that are hardly ever
seen by today's divers and that is that little bit of water past the 40m mark.
These Toads are called the Extreme Toads.
The Extreme Toads were
the brain wave of one lost toad called Prof Toad he wanted to push the
boundaries of toad existence and go beyond the norm with the backing of Head
Toad and Staff Toad he created the Extreme Toad Team.
Staff Toad, Prof Toad,
Jonah Toad and Thermo Toad currently make up the team but with the sad departure
of Prof Toad and fading sprit of Jonah Toad only Staff and Thermo Toad now go
into the unknown.
Dorothea was the birthplace of the Extreme
Toads and that's were we last had one of the deep dives. The account below is
that of Thermo.
The extreme toads have been a bit quite since Prof became under the thumb and
ran out on us…. So after the complications at day one of the Swanage trip a plan
was born on the morning of day 2 over breakfast while the other toads were gay
diving.
Kick off was at 7:30 from Staffs house this would give us a 3hr drive +
breakfast break. Kit fully loaded with and were off…… Finally we arrived at the
cafe all I can say is that Staff was right about the quality of breakfast…..
NICE.
We found the entrance at about 11:00 a nice bit of off road driving by me (in
the van) and we parked up!
Staff was like a little kid in a sweet shop, running about, jumping up and down,
so he had a 5 minuet time out.
The plan - 60m for 30min was the most we would get out of the back gas we had
two stages each 50% and 80% for deco. This would give us a run time of about 96
minuets. So we set the kit up, stages dropped down first followed by twins and
then us. By this stage it was about 12:30. Stages left on the side I got in, it
was bloody cold but nice 1st stage on (ally 80 with 50%) I’m now fully used to
the weight of that next cam the 2nd stage (ally7 with 80%), now due to my kit
configuration I was going to be using all stages on my left hand side, for this
I had got the tanks filled so that they were just negative in the water to allow
them to site just right. I clipped the top of the stage on while floating face
down in the water and then the back……. I felt heavy, this is going to need more
practice. Floating in the shallows I got a little use to the weight came back up
and Staff was ready.
We were going to drop down and swim out to the ladder and drop down to max
depth. Staff was leading as we set off the weight really hit me so I did the
head toad swim off the shallow area (forward moon walk) and we started to drop
down Staff found the gnome garden and then the spider pig ladder at about 40m
Staff tried to give me a signal that something was not right but he had dusty
bin (the biggest torch in the world) clipped off on his harness pointing
straight at me, I was now blind!
We went up a bit all was good then started going down again this was it down to
60 or we would not have enough gas to come home. The viability was out of this
world we hit the 50 mark and I was feeling good better than other deep dives so
I started to speed up 54m and a light started to flash at me I looked back up
and Staff was not happy he called the dive. We had run up about 30min of deco
now so when did the required deep stops and hit the 4.5m shelf at this point I
was so cold that I was unable to fully control myself during the shivers and we
had 24 minuets of deco required at this depth. At this point Staff made me aware
of the problems he had had, his tooth had exploded under the pressure due to a
gap between his tooth and a filling and the cold gas was hitting his nerve with
every breath. I did the honourable thing and called him every name under the
sun. Deco went quick with the added benefit of a drink and more piss taking.
All in all this was one of the best dives I had in ages and we will be back
there in a few weeks to hit 60m