
The author of this page is a born-again Christian first, all other things afterwards. Here is the story of his conversion.
Welcome to "solocavediver.com"
New! - there is now an interactive forum where you can post any matters arising from these webpages, or indeed anything you fancy as long as it's on topic - solo cavediving.
This is in fact Charles Read's scuba webpage. I appropriated the
web addresses "www.solocavediver.com" and "solocavediver.com" - which are precisely equivalent - because I thought that would
be cute, and because roughly half of the diving logbook entries below
are about solo cavedives. I intend to add more stuff that's specific
to the topic of solo cavediving.
Please send
comments and corrections to
read@maths.leeds.ac.uk.
Thanks to Steve Gerrard for taking the photos (see above and below!).
The short index follows immediately. The fuller and more descriptive index
is underneath it.
Short Index
Full Index.
These are (most recent first- and the most recent was added on 4 April '06
):
Florida trip from 24/3/06 to 8/4/06 .
Yucatan trip from 28/6/04 to 12/7/04 .
my trip to the Yucatan autumn '02,
the one at Easter '02,
the Mexico trip of autumn '01,
my general logbook for all other diving activities. (including my first ever cavedive).
What follows below consists of various other cavediving articles written by myself and others.
Added 11/2/03.
The Joys of Narked-At-50.
Narked-At-50 are a group of British "techie" wreck divers who dive just a little deeper than the average. Buddy inspiration rebreathers outnumber open-circuit rigs among their members (if my one trip's worth of experience with them is typical), and their more experienced divers are familiar with hundred meter deep dives in cool British waters and elsewhere. The 50 in the title Narked-At-50 of course refers to the metric depth of 50 meters (ca. 165 feet), at which one might reasonably expect to get a little woozy if breathing air. I did my first ever wreck dives in their company last weekend, which was really rather fun. Actually, really great fun. Click
here for more details, including re my feeling that the element of risk is by no means reduced in every way if one goes wreck diving, rather than (solo) cavediving. (But if that was your first ever wreck dive why did you do it in the company of this "heavy brigade"? Well, (1) I like them and (2) I was very careful and (3) I seem to have a daredevil reputation to keep up, something which appears mysterious because as I say, in some ways wreck diving seems to me more risky than the cavedives I normally do. But then, everyone's happy in their normal environment).
Added 4/9/02.
The Saga of the Bridge II computer battery.
I had one of these go flat
just before being due to go to Mexico, and far too late to send it off to Dive Rite for a replacement. See what happened next here . Note: some time after I published this, a British stockist sent me an email saying he now stocks the elusive CR3032. To check this out see
Cell Pack Solutions at
www.cellpacksolutions.com ; the entry for the CR3032 is at
http://www.cellpacksolutions.com/Search_All.asp?searchall=cr3032
.
Added 4/9/02
High capacity NiMH D cells.
I'd like to advertise (they ain't paying me!) eurobatteries.com who as of this writing are selling 7 amp-hour 1.2 volt nickel metal hydride rechargeable D cells at £7.85 each, a keen price, and delivered them to my door (in the UK) in roughly 18 hours. Good job well done I say.
Added 30/8/02.
Coo! Fame!!!!
As some of you out there know, I am shortly going on another cavediving trip to Mexico - this is my summer holiday before I hit a heavy teaching load in the autumn term here in Leeds. I'm very lucky to be able to go twice in one year (last was over Easter). But Geoff, my buddy for half of the trip, reports that due to the huge fame of solocavediver.com, we are being gossipped about all over the world, with "what will they get up to" high on the agenda of lotsa dudes whose business it probably isn't. Well to all of you out there who aren't lucky enough to be actually getting wet, I make the following promise: all events will be faithfully reported here , in my usual style. Which as you know is sometimes controversial, but honest - I like to think you can really get the FEEL of a good cavedive by studying my logbooks. So to all my -hmmm- fan club out there, fear not - all will be revealed. But perhaps not instantly when I get back, as I said I'll have a fair old teaching load.
New 31/05/02. Saying something nice about "TC".
In the early part of my
scuba logbook you can find some criticism of Ted Cole,
the only one of my three diving instructors with whom I failed to get along. Now
I naively assumed that I would keep the criticism anonymous by abbreviating his
name to "TC" throughout - but there aren't that many cavediving instructors in
the world, so it's pretty generally known that the comments refer to him. Since
it would be implausible to pretend I didn't really mean it, I prefer to balance
my comments with a short, honest article about some of his GOOD qualities - after all,
we all have good and bad qualities, right? And with Ted, a certain particular
good quality sticks very firmly in my mind. Click here
for more details.
New! The Easter '02 Mexico Trip. Diving with Brent + Students again.
See here for the best dives of my Mexico trip of Easter '02. See here for the
complete logbook for the whole trip.
"In Praise of Solo Cavediving"
A short essay on this topic will be found here
Please note that though this is a statement of Yours
Truly's philosophy about diving, it was rather written
in haste (I received a couple of emails from DIR dudes asserting that
I was nuts, and naturally wrote something with a view to winding them up
further. I was Called... The Very Word of the Great Big Stalactite with the
Loose Moorings came to me in a vision...) and it needs polishing.
Also note that I still
love diving with a buddy, though due to being busy and British
I haven't managed to be in the same place at the same time as my
American diving buddies for some time.
Disclaimer (Funerals Are Expensive).
One alarming suggestion I had over the
emails is that someone might conceivably get the idea that reading
my webpage is enough to turn them into cavedivers (solo or otherwise)
too. This is not the case. If you act as if it were the case,
you are likely to kill yourself.
My email address is above and I'll
be happy to point would be cavedivers to people who will train them.
To be sure, I was not always trained up to the level of what I got
up to myself; but I got SOME training, and later got the full cave
certification and all that.
Diving Logbook.
Click here
for my scuba diving logbook (mostly cavediving, rather more than half of which solo), up to around last March
(March 2000).
Click here for the Mexico trip I did
just recently in August-September 2001. It contains accounts of 19 cavedives. The trip was unusual in that in fact all the dives were solo.
Nitrox Homebrewing.
Click here
for mathematical info on how to homebrew Nitrox (partially fill the tank
with pure O2, then top off with air).
Rebreather Project.
Click here
for my d-i-y rebreather project. Some mail feedback and discussion is
here.
The G1 rebreather has now got about 25 dives on it.
Some links about rebreathers
-
Click here
for some newsarticles I considered wiser than the average.
-
Click here
for the British Cave Diving Group.
- Click here
for "diver net".
-
Click here
for how to work out homebrew Nitrox mixes correctly.
-
Click here
for how to correct homebrew Nitrox mixes for van der Waals effect.
- Here
is a paper by Erik C. Baker about calculating
"no-stop" times.
The originals to this and the next four papers are on
http://www.gap-software.com/decotheory.html
- Here
is a paper by Erik C. Baker about understanding "M-values".
- Here
is a paper by Erik C. Baker about "deep stops".
- Here
is a paper by Erik C. Baker about ox-tox calculations.
- Here
is a general "deco tutorial" by Erik C. Baker.
Quite long - but excellently written, like the rest of this
sequence of papers.
-
Click here
for a few sites I haven't dived but have had recommended.
- scuba article
- scuba rebreather article
- dive site
- phys.html Diving physiology
- springs.html list of Florida springs
-
Click here
for an article about using zinc-air cells as O2 sensors
[NB this doesn't work well enough to be used underwater. I tried it!]
-
Click here
for an interesting account of how to use bubble models
for decompression strategies. The full mathematical description
is in one of the references, rather poorly written though IMHO.
I may write something myself at some point.
-
Click here
for general caving information.
-
The UKRS web site is
here.
- Here are some photos...
