With the club trip to Scapa Flow just a fortnight away, six club members
arrived at Portland Port for a warmup day trip for six club members.  Five
miles offshore, first dive of the day was the Elena R.  A Greek merchant
ship of 4,600 tons mined at the start of WWII, heavily salvaged and broken
with parts standing up to 7m above a 27m gravel bed.

We had one buddy pair on single 12's, one of whom was starting to feed the
fish in the mild swell, so we put them in first.  Me and my buddy were the
last pair in, both on Nitrox, him on twin 12's, me with a single 15 and
side slung 7l stage of bailout.

No rain and low winds for a couple of weeks made conditions excellent (for
the English Channel) - Viz was up to around five metres, there was lots of
natural light on the bottom and plenty of fish, spider crabs, lobster and
conger eels lounging around the iron terraces.  The wreck seemed a shotline
graveyard, littered with coils and loops of rope, tattered ends standing
upright and coiling in midwater like a plague of cobras.

After 27 mins, and with my buddy's computer still showing 5 mins remaining,
my Stinger had counted down to 0 mins NDL.  I set it to "+1 conservative"
for the multi-day repetitive diving on the CAIV, and had forgotten to
return it to defaults, so I was happy to let it run up a couple of minutes
of phantom deco (running the profile through GAP afterwards confirms that
it was phantom).  We left the bottom on a DSMB after 30 mins for a slow
ascent including all stops.

My profile at:
http://www.huwporter.com/scuba/profile.gif

As the boat picked us up, the skipper told us we have missed all the fun,
and two of our crew had already been airlifted to shore.  Our seasick
friend lost control of his drysuit with a blocked autodump after about 15
mins on the bottom, despite heroic efforts from his buddy he blew up from
20 metres and immediately started showing symptoms.

The skipper got him on O2 straight away, the coastguard was called and the
chopper was overhead almost as soon as his buddy had completed her safe
ascent.  They were taken to Poole hospital where he was diagnosed with
a 'medium/severe' neurological bend and recompressed on an aggressive (C3?)
7 hour schedule.

As they had already left, there was nothing for us to do but head back to
shore.  Nobody felt like doing the second dive, so we juggled cars and gear
to the hospital, found he was responding well to treatment but was to be
kept in overnight, so headed back to London.  He had another two hours in
the pot on Monday morning, and was discharged in the afternoon, OK, but off
diving - and therefore Scapa - for at least six weeks.

Cheers,
Huw