Another dive on the lovely Volnay. Eugene had missed the boilers on his first dive on the wreck, so was quite chuffed when we got to the bottom of the shot line right by the boilers. I pointed at them in an exaggerated fashion, but I don't think he had missed them. We wandered over the wreck finding endless rusting shell casings and beds of thousands of Malteser-sized balls of lead shot. We also came to a fish caught in some fishing net. Eugene tried to cut the net and free the fish but ended up catching his first stage. It took me a few moments to realise what had happened because I thought Eugene was pointing at his head, when in fact he was pointing behind his head at his first stage to tell me he had become entangled. He was very easily freed and we abandoned the poor fish to its fate and continued the dive.
We swam away from the wreck and found the flat sea bed nearby littered with rusting bits and pieces that had spilt off the main site. Unfortunately whenever we stopped to have a close look at anything we stirred up the vis something chronic and had to move on. This happened when I found a very light box covered in rust and algae. It would have been interesting to bring it to the surface and force it open, but fiddling around with that and the delayed SMB would have been impractical. It probably only contained phosphorus anyway which wouldn't have been much fun. Eugene got to 70 bar and I decided to put my navigation skills to the test and try and find the boilers (and hence the shot line) again. We swam straight to the boilers and I was very chuffed with myself. However the shot line had gone so that the boat could move around picking up divers so we had to go through the rigmarole of using Paul's SMB again. Unfortunately the thing jammed because the line got twisted round the reel handle. I managed to stay down and hold onto the wreck (I was loathe to let the thing go because it didn't belong to me) pull the line to give some slack and allow Eugene to untangle the line. This he did expertly and the SMB went whizzing satisfyingly to the surface. Great teamwork! The only down side to the dive was that after all the faffing around with the SMB Eugene surfaced with only 30 bar. Lesson learned: leave the bottom with plenty of air, especially when using a delayed SMB.