Blog Archive

Saturday 6 August 2016

The lesser northern diver

Three nights ago we were treated to a sighting of a Great Northern Diver. Today it was my turn to don dive gear and go overboard. The reason being that the water inlet to the aft toilet was blocked rendering our aft heady out of order for the return passage to Iceland. Clearly such a state of affairs could not be tolerated so on went the dive suit, the weights, the aqualung and all the paraphernalia of cold water diving. Rather less gracefully than my avian friend I stepped off the back of the boat to sort out the raw water intake.

The water was clear and cold and only the odd bit of ice drifted over me as I scrubbed and poked away barnacles. First up was the propeller which was still significantly encrusted despite the good works of the 2 boys in Isafjordur whose arms Rod twisted into doing a quick scrub before departure 2 weeks ago. Then I attacked the rudder which was also growing barnacles in some of the hard to get to places. Whilst doing this I discovered the bolts on two plates limiting the movement of the rugger stock were loose so a quick dash to the surface for spanners and a scrubbing brush appeared to fix that problem. Next I checked out the rudder and found no damage from our grounding. The keel too was unscathed - phew! Finally I did the rounds of all the water intakes and drains and de-vegetated them.

Back on board Denzil connected up the toilet and it flushed. Hooray!

I didn't change the anodes so we will need to dive again in September and I also noted that the starboard ground plate was missing. So another problem to resolve.

So a note for my dive log. Depth 3m, duration 59 minutes latitude 70 29N 21 59W.