Diving - The adventure continues!

UK diving in 2019

Babbacombe, April 2019

We had a weekend shore diving trip planned for Babbacombe in mid April, but the weather had been bad for weeks and it looked very much like the whole trip would be abandoned, but in the end a group of us from Aldershot Dolphins set off to see if we could manage to get any diving in.

The trip down was busy and tiresome (and I wasn't even driving), but our B&B was pleasant, overlooking the bay.

Sadly, what we could see below looked pretty murky, a view confirmed by a closer look from the beach, but we'd planned a night dive and a fair number of our group had never done one, so we kitted up in the car park and entered the water.

It proved quite tricky to get in and my buddy, Nigel (doing his first UK sea dive, I seem to recall, being a PADI AOW), struggled to sink, which was because he was underweighted.

That sorted, we managed to get below the waves and torches on tried to explore, but it was obvious that visibility was pretty poor (I recorded it at 0.5M!) and got worse as we headed out, which I didn't expect!

We did spot a good sized Lobster, but it wasn't a pleasant experience and we finished the dive after just 17 minutes, which was about average for the group.

OK, we'd had a dive, but it wasn't a great one for all the travel and cost, maybe tomorrow would be better.

By the time we'd all dekitted and packed, the only place open for food was an Indian restaurant, but it proved to be a good choice and very affordable and everyone ended the evening in a good mood.

After a pleasant breakfast in our B&Bs (we were scattered across 3), we headed off towards Hope Cove, believing that its orientation might offer better diving conditions.

We stopped in a shop specialising in Spearfishing equipment and Mobility Scooters(!) for some of us to get air fills and then drove for about an hour to Hope Cove.

The weather was nice here and the water, from the shore, definitely looked clearer than it had been on Babbacombe Beach, so we set to kitting up.

I dived with Nigel again and we found that the vis was remarkably good! An easy 5, probably more, metres and as we were shallow (never getting below 7 metres), the light was excellent too.

We explored the sandy areas and some rocky outcrops, where we found more fish to look at and stayed in for half an hour, until Nigel started to get cold.

Overall it was a pleasant, if unexciting, dive, but everyone was having a good time, which was helped enormously by an excellent lunch and a beer in the pub on the beach side. While some people had air, no-one bothered with another dive and we headed back to Babbacombe to shower and then adjourned to the pub for a couple of beers, before making our way to a local Fish & Chip restaurant for some excellent (and large!)fish and chips.

By now, we'd agreed that the following day's forecast was even worse than it had been, so we had another beer, post dinner and returned to our beds, ready to drive home after breakfast the next day.

As we drove along the coast, it was clear just how murky the conditions were as a deep brown, tea-like mix stained the sea for as far as we could see, and we all agreed that it would have been pointless to have dived again.

It was a long way to go for 2 (if that) rather average dives, but we all had a good time and with a mix of ages, it was nice to see how well everyone got along, so it hadn't been a wasted trip.

Training and other club diving, April & May 2019

A group of us went out in the Club RHIB over Easter.

This was the RHIB's first outing, so we stayed in the harbout and dived the Bombardon Unit and Landing Craft for the first dive.

The vis was a bit limited, but we found our way around both, sadly not seeing the John Dory the other pairings spotted before us, on the rope between the two.

As the weather was fair, John drove the boat out to the Bow of the Black Hawk, some distance out of Portland Harbour and the boat ran well.

I dived this with Rohit, keen to complete a final drill for his Sports Diver qualification. Sadly the vis was poor and the shot wasn't on anything we recognised as a wreck, so I tied my reel around the shot and set off to complete a circular search.

Quite quickly, though, we found some wreckage and so tied off the line and continued around, finding more and tying off again as we went.

After a while we turned around and worked our way back to the shot, but then moved off in a different direction and found some more wreckage before our air levels determined it was time to surface, with us ascending the shot line.

We'd seen a few fish, as well as the wreckage, including a stunning colourful Cuckoo Wrasse, which Rohit could scarcely believe existed in UK waters, not having seen one before!

It was a good day's diving, but I couldn't stay for a second as some did. Rohit got his drill signed off the next day and became a qualified Sports Diver, while Olly came along the following day and completed his Ocean Diver training, a successful weekend in many ways.

With a good influx of recent members to our club, and Julian doing a good job of keeping interest high in training for those already qualified, we had a few training and club dives to carry out and May proved to be a very busy month!

First we took an Early May Bank Holiday Monday trip down to Wraysbury just because we could! Vis was a bit disappointing, except for one brief moment around some wrecks where I could see my buddy, Olly, some 5 metres away clear as the Med! Sadly it lasted a few metres and then descended to about 0.5 metres! Some of the club went the following Sunday and had excellent vis, just my luck!

A large group of us headed down to NDAC at Chepstow and found crystal clear vis, 10M or more! Unfortunately, there wasn't any time to explore as I was carrying out training for some Dive Leader Trainees on moving and lifting a shot weight.

First student was Ria, who was underweighted, but worse, the 10KG weight belt w were using as a shot unbuckled from the lift bag and sank (like a 10KG lead weight!) to the bottom of the lake!

Amazingly, in the lovely vis, I quickly found it, but left it somewhere safe to come back up and find Ria still on the surface. Using a line she was able to descend and we took 1Kg off the shot weight which sorted that out.

She relocated and launched the shot without problem and carried out a mid-water DSMB launch too, with great style!

My second dive was with Dawn and Will, again they had no real trouble with the exercise, but Dawn's Octopus free flowed uncontrollably when sending the lift bag up to the surface and was only controlled by turning it off for a few minutes on the surface, but that out of the way, we completed Will's drills too.

We all agreed that we needed to come back to NDAC soon, to enjoy a 'bimble' in the great vis!

Next up was a trip to the third of the inland sites we tend to use, Vobster Quay. This was a midweek dive and it was just the four of us in the lake, except for a group of Navy personnel testing a submersible ROV!

The main point of the trip was to complete, Sónia's (A Portugese woman who works at our local hospital) Ocean Diver training, but we had a couple of drills for Dawn to carry out for her Dive Leader training.

The first dive was cut a little short by an uninterrupted CBL, but it wasn't a major issue. We'd explored the Plane and a few other shallower attractions during the dive before that.

After a break, we completed a 40 minute dive, mostly in the shallows for Sónia, but Dawn and I dipped down pass through a small hole in the bottom of the crushing works, while Julian and Sónia explored the top. Sadly, although we saw a few Perch, there weren't the dozens resting around the Crushing Works, that we'd seen the previous Autumn.

We finished off with a 'Huddle', which got me my first new qualification for a few years, an RNLI Safety at Sea, certification!

Julian and I reckoned that a Bank Holiday trip out on the RHIB would be popular at the end of May and 6 of us, Julian, Dawn, Cameron, Nicole, Olly and myself, arrived and readied the boat.

Our first dive, with a strong Westerly, was on the east side of the Bill, with a drift from Grove Point.

There were a lot of club RHIBs out and at least one hardboat, but I dropped in with Dawn and found impressively clear vis. The drift dive turned out to be one of the best I'd done, with plenty of Wrasse, Blennies, Crabs of various kinds, Blennies and even 4 good sized Dogfish spotted in our 40 minutes, getting down to 25 Metres.

On our safety stop, we were right by a huge Barrel Jellyfish and we could see a group of small fish, obviously living in and around it - Incredible to see so close up!

Lunch was in Castletown, where we also refilled our cylinders and I tried to work out why both wrist seals on my drysuit were now leaking - I think it was grit from Babbacombe between the seals and rings that hold them in, but the next dive will tell me if I'm right, having cleaned them out thoroughly now.

We thought we'd dive the Spaniard out on the inside of the harbour wall, but we forgot where it was and ended up doing the Bombardon Unit and Landing Craft again, but the vis was so much better on this trip than the last one, that it was like another site!

We explored the VIC next to it, and numerous swim throughs and knooks and crannies, before continuing on to the Landing Craft, which wasn't quite so clear, but still better than I recalled seeing it and we then surfaced to find an overcast sky and wind meaning Julian, who'd skipped the second dive to save time,had to tow us away from the wall to get us safely aboard.

Once Cameron surfaced with Olly and Nicole we repeated the towing exercise and the 3 of us quickly got them aboard and motored back to the Ferrybridge Marina, but found the launch/recovery vehicle out of action, so we lost some time until it was going again.

The boat was unpacked, cleaned and fettled and we changed and packed our cars, before a quick drink in Billy Winter's, which also does excellent food, and then headed for home, getting back about 9:15PM and glad of a bank holiday Monday to come to sort everything out!

Finally, on the last day of May, a group of us went to Wraysbury.

Primarily, it was to give a couple of new members a chance to dive with us for the first time and try out some new kit.

Unfortunately, my first dive was fairly short lived. Tess, a PADI qualfied diver who had just joined and was my buddy, found that beyond about 6M she could not clear her ears. We'd explored the bus briefly, but spent the rest of the dive, up and down to a platform at about 8M until she admitted defeat and we ended the dive.

During our surface interval, her ear popped and her second dive, with 3 other divers, went much more smoothly and she seemed happy with the experience.

My second dive went well, too. I dived with Nicole, who is working up towards her Sports Diver qualification, but already a very steady diver and a good buddy to dive with.

We wandered around the lake, having jumped off the pier away from the shop, taking in some of the wrecks and other sites.

I'd taken my camera, in the hope of seeing one of the Pike and getting a photo, but none were seen around the wrecks, where they tend to linger.

However, as we neared a platform towards the end of the dive, Nicole was vigourously pointing in its direction. It took me a little while to spot what she was pointing at, but there, resting quietly on the platform was a good sized Pike.

It was so still that I wondered if it was alive, but getting closer I could see it was and swam unhurriedly away as we neared it. Nicole said after the dive, that she looked back and reckoned it was returning to the platform.

Overall, we had a pleasant morning in the lake, being a Friday and the lake being almost empty apart from the 6 of us and the vis being pretty decent everywhere, except for a couple of odd clouds of silt, which we negotiated without problems.

Aeolian Sky, May 10th 2019

Between all those club dives, Julian and I had a dive on the Aeolian Sky.

Julian had mentioned he'd not dived the Aeolian Sky, which is the biggest wreck along the south coast (in reasonable diving depths, anyway, at around 30M) and I noticed that Wey Chieftan, who we'd dived with a few times in 2018 and the M2 with in January, were running a trip out to it on May 10th. As my birthday was near that date, it seemed the perfect time to go, so Julian and I booked on.

Being a Friday, the boat was fairly quiet, with a group of divers onboard who were diving, with other arriving the next day, over the weekend. Sue and Richard, the owners, greeted us like old friends and they're always good to dive with.

The weather was kind, being clear and fairly still, both the wind and water and the hour or so journey out from Weymouth was enjoyable.

We took our twinsets to get a decent length dive, but when it came to jump in, we both rushed a bit and probably weren't quite as prepared as we should have been, but not so bad as to cause any issues during the dive.

We followed the shot down and the vis, whilst a bit 'snotty' with plankton, was pretty decent at around 5M, but we seemed to be on a separated section of wreck.

We swam forward and found the stern, but then, somehow, swam off the wreck!

For a few horrible minutes it seemed we may have lost a 143M wreck and would have the shortest dive on the Sky ever!

Fortunately, after we turned around, a huge shadow resolved itself into the bulk of the wreck after a little while and we swam over the superstructure.

The last time I dived this wreck (in 2015), the superstructure looked impressively intact, but now it looks as if someone had taken a huge sledgehammer to it and shattered it into hundreds of pieces. It's still recognisable, with windows and stairs, but no longer a solid single structure.

We swam forward along the wreck, spotting plenty of life and finally reached the end of the wreck.

Someone on the boat (Maybe in Richard's breifing, I forget now to be honest) had said the actual bow is some metres off the end of the wreck, so we swam out a bit, but didn't find anything else and, on turning back, didn't find the wreck again, a cross current must have moved us away, so we popped a DSMB at that point, just on the edge of entering deco and surfaced, with a total dive time of 42 minutes.

It had been an enjoyable day out and a good dive. The wreck is beginning to break up, but it's still a huge, impressive wreck to dive on, especially located where it is.

We'd got lucky with parking and not had to pay and we found another free spot long enough to enjoy an excellent beer and fish and chips in the Red Lion Pub just behind the quay in Brewer's Quay.

The drive back was easy by the time we left about 6:30 and we'd had another great day's diving with Richard and Sue on the Wey Cheiftan. We already had plans for a lot more diving with them in the coming months!

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