A review of diving 2013

Rather a poor year for diving with just 14 dives this year compared with my average of 25. A combination of very bad weather that resulted in a large number of dives being cancelled plus supporting my mother in law down in Devon.

The trouble with such a small number of dives in the UK is that the poor dives appear to dominate. Silly but that is the way it appears.

The best bit of diving this year has been the discovery of the Reef off Budleigh beach, excellent shore dive.

Hoping for a good years diving in 2013.

Diving on the P12 & Bembridge Ledges 14th October 2012

As it turned out this was my last dive of 2013. Not the best of dives as it turned out. The P12 varies between being dark and beautifully clear.

This time is was one of those dark dives. Still a very good dive as there is so much to look around and into. This time there was a scallop bed in the adjacent gravel so a good time was had by those divers who picked up their tea!

This dive was with my son Will and was to be his deepest dive at nearly 20 metres, a very competent diver but it was still to be a challenge for him. It was the darkness, not a problem, just him keeping track of me as his buddy. I have got use to this ‘dark diving’ where you have in the corner of your eye seeing your buddy’s torch. My buddy usually has a difference torch to me and the other divers so it is noticeable by the colour of their dive torch or the flash of their fins between a positive visible check.

That way you can maximise what you can look at without losing track of your buddy, and it minimises any stress during the dive. With it being Wills first real ‘dark dive’ it was harder work for him and hence a higher air consumption. Still it was a really good dive.

The second dive which was a drift dive along the Bembridge ledges was rather poor! Very poor vis with so little life, I guess all the fish were out of sight some 2.5 Metres away. The visibility kept going down to about a 1 metre with nothing interesting to look at on the bottom. So after about 25 minutes I called off the dive. I was just getting bored.

If you wish to see the video in the YouTube website click on the link:
P12 & Bembridge Ledges drift

Night Dive on Budleigh Reef 15th September 2012

This was a dive organized by Tony Reed and advertised on Facebook. It resulted in a threesome dive with Zoe.

Diving on the Budleigh Reef is a stunning UK shore dive by day and an excellent night dive. Sadly the video just does not do it justice. The human eye can see far more than the video camera, in the poor lighting! The amount of life that is around at night is stunning and of course it is not the same as daytime diving. So please be patient with watching the video, I did cut out the very boring bits!

The reef is between 8 and 10 minutes swim out from the shore running more or less parallel with the shore. One of the nerve racking times for the lead diver as there are a few gaps in the reef and there is always doubt in the back of ones mind that you have swam in the gap a missed the reef.

On this dive we saw Dover sole, turbot, cuttle fish, spider crabs, edible crabs, star fish, pipe fish. not forgetting bib and pollock just out of range of the camera lights. 

Zoe really likes to get close into the  sea life and it is Zoe who is stroking the Dover sole at the start of the dive over the sandy bottom on route to the reef.

If you have never tried a night dive go with an experienced night diver and try it!


To view the video in a separate screen on the YouTube site click on the link:Night Dive on Budleigh Reef

Diving the Reef at Budleigh Salterton 9th September 2012

Really great dive on the Reef at Budleigh, 10 mins swim out from the shore. Two cuttle fish caught on video, odd they did not change colour when they posed in their 'threatening position'. The large wrasse were out and the viz was near 6 metres!

I would say that this is the best shore dive site, better than Chesil beach. A bit boring during the 10 min swim on way out and and back. You have to correct for the tide drift on the out and back from the reef. otherwise you find you have a long walk at the end of a dive with all your kit!!

The only down side to the whole thing is the parking, where you are limited to 2 hours on the road. You could drop the stuff off and park in the nearby main car-park but then there is the fag of getting the car and getting a nearby parking place on the road.

 clink on the link to view the video on the YouTube site: Diving the Reef at Budleigh Salterton

Lobster Pot Diving 12th August 2012

This was a second attempt to dive in some really unusual places. Roger and Tony own and run the fishing boat Kll, their problem is the loss of a string of lobster pots!

Anyway they have a number of lost pots and hoped that we could retrieve them. Last year we failed to retrieve any pots but we had hi hopes for this year.

The Kll is not a dive boat and therefore we needed to sort out a plan to carry out the search and the location of the string of pots. The Kll has a satnav system that can record the position of the boat down to the nearest metre.

Therefore like last year we had a meeting with Roger the skipper to plan out each phase of the dive:

The diving period

Dive entry

Search technique

Lobster pot recovery technique.

Dive recovery

Emergency measures.

The search techniques proposed by Roger was the same as last year excellent with line being laid between two shot lines that would be in the same position as the missing lobster pots. Therefore all we had to do was to follow the newly laid marker line between the shot lines along the bottom until we found a pot line.

Like last year during the dive I would record, by video, the seabed to discover the reason for the snagged and cut lobster pot lines.

Dan and I are what I would call experience divers and have dived in virtually zero viz without getting lost! Even so we did not undertake this dive lightly and both of us carried our normal complete set safety and retrieval equipment.

This time we located a pot line and pots right away tied them to the main line and un-snagged the pot lines. Sadly as can been seen by the video our knots were not up to the mark with heaving up a string of pots as we lost the string.

We repeated the dive but the shot line and the marker line were laid going in the opposite direction with an overlap where we could the pots. This time we just cut the pots loose and tied each one on separately and success we pulled up two pots.

So a lot better than last year!


To view the video from the YouTube website click on the link: Lobster Pot Diving

Diving the A1 & Fossil bed drift 9th August 2012

This was one of those dives that as a diver, one has to do. The submarine is a real piece of history that is mostly intact and of a size that can be appreciated under water.

There is an interesting spread of life of crabs, gobies, a wrasse at the stern, one rather nice lobster under the bow with a shoal of Pollock around the top of the bow. There was a shoal of junior bib halfway between the stern and the conning tower.

I would have said that it is a 30~40 minute dive to see it all, enjoying it, and at 11 metre down is a relacking dive. Dan and I stayed on the wreck for 52 minutes, which was a bit too long as once seen does not hold ones interest for that long.

I never have much luck with the drift dive on fossil bed drift, too many dives when I have just seen a muddy bottom for 40 minutes in a 1 metre viz hanging on until mentally I gave up!

This dive was better than that with a bit of rough surface and some life, with Dan finding a lobster. I just don’t know how he does it, I get the feeling that he could find a lobster in a garden pond!  The viz on this dive was 2~3 metres, which was hard work with three divers on a drift dive.

Once I came across an area at the end of a ‘good’ fossil bed drift that looked as if I could find some shark teeth. So I always live in hope of hitting the ‘jackpot’ with a future fossil bed drift.

To view the video in the YouTube website click the link: Diving the A1 & Fossil bed drift

The A1 is a protected wreck and was the Royal Navy’s first submarine. The A1 was launched 9^th July 1902. The A1 was accidentally rammed by the SS Berwick on the 18^th March 1904 with the loss of two officers and nine ratings.The wreck was salvaged and modified with a second water tight hatch at the base of the conning tower. The A1 was put back into service but was finally used as an underwater target and finally lost in 1911.

After the wreck was found in 1989, by a fisherman who snagged his nets on an underwater object, Martin Woodward dived on the object and identified it as the HMS/m A1.The AI was then subsequently bought by Martin Woodward in 1994. In 1997 the wreck of the A1 came under the protection of wrecks act 1973.

Taking extracts from the Archaeological Report:

HMS/M A1, BRACKLESHAM BAY, WEST SUSSEX.

April 2006 Ref: 53111.03jj

Prepared by: Wessex Archaeology

The wreck of the HMS/m A1 represents the remains of the first truly British designed and built submarine, following on directly from the Holland Class design bought from America. After the HMS/m A1 was constructed it was decided to make major changes to the A class boats, such as increasing the firepower by adding a second torpedo tube (to lie side by side), therefore making the HMS/m A1 a unique example of early British submarine design.

While the site itself has been subjected to the illegal removal of a considerable amount of internal and external fittings the main hull structure remains in relatively good condition for a wreck that has lain at the bottom of the Solent for nearly 100 years.

Type: A Class

Dimensions:     Length: 103 feet 3 inches, diameter: 12 feet 8 inches

Lost:                 1911

Cargo:              None, not carrying torpedoes at time

Complement:   12 crew, none on board at time of sinking

Built:                Vickers Sons & Maxim Ltd at Barrow-in-Furness

Launched:       9th July 1902

Length:            103 feet 3 inches

Length of remains: 24.5m

Beam:              12 feet 8 inches

Draught:           11 feet 6 inches

Displacement 165 tons surfaced/180 tons submerged

Lost:                 1911

Cause:             Tow line parted

Armament:       One 18in torpedo tube in bow, with two reloads carried (total of three). The A1 is not thought to have been carrying torpedos when it was lost.

Complement:   11 (not manned at the time of its loss in 1911). Two officers and nine ratings were lost when it first sank, when it was rammed by SS Berwick Castle on 18th March, 1904.

Diving the Nab Tower 13th June 2012

After suffering a rather bad cold, sort of man 'flu, for over a week and now with my head blocked I am getting fed up with eating warm oysters!

So a bit of a chance to update my diving blog, poor as it is this year with the weather so bad this summer/

This was a rather dark dive on the Nab Tower, lots of fish at the upper level, which I should have taken more video of. This was one of those rare occasions that the Nab tower was at a slack tide so we were able to explore the far side, sad it was so dark!!

As this was an evening dive and as luck would have it we we were treated to a 'show' by the RNLI on the way back into harbour.



to view the video on the YouTube website click on the link: Diving the Nab Tower

Drift dive on the Bembridge Ledges 30th May 2012

I have been far to slow in uploading this dive video to my blog, just a bit too many other things going on in my life at this time.

This dive could have been one of the longest drift dives I have undertaken but if you call up a dive time of an hour then after an hour you should be up. The reason was that at the end of the dive the sea bottom was had the most interesting I have ever come across. So many unusual rock formations caused by the sea currents.

There is a nice cuttlefish at the beginning of the dive, some crabs and a number of other fish during the rest of the dive. Not a lot, but enough to keep one interested. Very nice dive and I hope to persuade the skipper in future drift dives to 'drop' us off in the area where he picked us up on this drift dive.

Jason is the youngest diver I have dived with and as can been seen on the video stays close to me and regularly checks on me during the dive. A lot better than a few older divers I have dived with. With a bit more experience it should sort out his hand movements and his buoyancy control, which is at it’s hardest at the shallow depth of this dive.

 If you want to see the dive video on the Youtube site click the link below:
 Drift dive on the Bembridge Ledges 

Diving Chesil Cove 27th May 2012

I have been a bit slack with keeping up this blog with my dives, but that being said diving has been rather slow this year with the very poor weather.

Diving in Chesil Cove always has a difficult entry and exit to the sea. The viz was rather poor for Chesil, which got worse on the second dive. I think that this was due to the silt that must have washed into the sea during the previous weeks of heavy rain.

Not a lot of life due to the poor viz but quite a few spider crabs! The underwater surge was the worse I have ever come across.  The underwater cricket was a first for me though!

As you can see the final exit was an event!

You can link to the youtube site by the link Diving Chesil Cove 27th May 2012

Diving on the Bembridge Ledges 16th May 2012

This was a drift dive on the Bembridge Ledges off the Isle of Wight, sadly with not a lot of 'drift' going on.

There was some life underwater apart from Ali, my dive buddy, and myself. There was a dogfish I scared off but I think that the problem is that the bulk of the sea life is below the 10 metre level.

I have in the past used my compass to head eastward to the deeper water and the faster flowing current rather than the 7 Metre deep dropping off point. On this dive we hit our deepest point of the dive at 10.4 Metres at the end of the dive. Ali tends to feel the cold and with a drift dive there is very little diver movement and with a sea temperature of 11C it was a little chilly so this was only a 41 minute dive.

This was Ali's 300th dive and my 202nd dive. Great fun!

A little bit of a worry at the start as we were in the water on a lobster pot line!

These evening dives after work  are the best! A complete chill out after a day at work and hopefully a lovely sunset as one reaches the surface.

Or click on the link to view the video on YouTube Diving on the Bembridge Ledges 16th May 2012 

 

Diving the Far Mulberry 14th April 2012

The first dive of the year and as far as I am concerned it has been far too long since the last dive.

I have had 4 dives cancelled since my last dive and today was supposed to be a days diving with Wightdiver, which was also cancelled due to lack of numbers.

Luckily Simon Bradburn, who runs Southern Coastal Charters, was able to take a last minute booking with Dan and myself.

A very nice day for a dive and after so long in the water a simple dive to the Far Mulberry was just what Dan and I needed. The Far Mulberry is such a simple no stress dive where I feel it is impossible to get lost (well that is my point of view), with a permanent shot line for decent and accent (just watch out and not get your fingers pinched in the links) with a 11metre depth.  

Not as much life as I expected on the Far Mulberry. Sadly lobster pots are being placed close to the wreck, which is regarded by divers as a no take site. I have noticed a decline in the crab and lobster population over the last couple of years, which I blame on the location of pots near the wreck.

The viz was also a bit on the poor side being about 3 metre, OK for UK diving but one has to be an optimist.

Needless to say I enjoyed the dive and felt really great afterwards, just missed that diving!

If you wish to access the Youtube site Far Mulberry 14th April 2012 

A review of diving 2011

Well I only had 20 dives that year and that was with 9 of those in New Zealand!

The UK dives don’t appear to have been memorable either. I guess that it was just one of those years with too much plankton or too much muck inthe water!

A lot of the summer months appears to have been blown out so losing out on booked dives, which appears to a common tendency at the moment. I suppose that I could be a bit of an anorak and log all my dives in a spreadsheet to see my peak time of the year for diving. Nope!

I guess that the diving for the lobster pots was the one dive that stays in my mind as a good dive; it is just that we failed to locate the right pots.

So here is a better year of diving in 2012!

Diving the 'Lord Percy' & Landing craft 15th October 2011

The ‘Lord Percy’ is a working barge that lies in around 14m of water and rises up to 5m from the seabed. Yes it is named after me!

Previously some years ago on a days diving on Wightdiver the second dive was going to be a drift dive but the skipper gave us the option of investigating an ‘interesting’ blip that he had previously recorded on the sounder

The naming was based on the fact that I was the first diver to ‘land’ on the wreck. In fact the viz was so bad on the first dive that it was my bum that struck it first going down the shot line!

The ‘Lord’ bit was added as the divers, who were winding me up at the time, thought calling it just ‘Percy’ was rather boring!

It is a rather a grand name for a wreck of a barge loaded with cement bags. If the viz is right it is an excellent dive with the gaps between the cement bags homes for a lot of sea life.

The Landing craft is equally a very nice dive with lot of nooks and crannies.

This days diving had all the promise of being really good. Both shallow dives on a nice day so a totally relaxing pair of dives. I was diving with my really dive buddy Dan and my son Will. Threesomes on a dive I feel are rather difficult but we have all have dived together before and for us it works, even in low or poor viz we do not lose ourselves.

Sadly both of these dives on this occasion turned out to be pretty poor. We missed the wreck of the Lord Percy! It appears that the tide turned between the shot line being dropped and us (and the other divers) getting to the bottom. We were expecting the shot line to be lying across the wreck! It was not and the plankton bloom was bad enough to give us a black out at the sea bottom. So just a silt covered bottom in the dark!

The landing craft was a little better but still rather murky! The dive plan was to send about 20 minutes on the wreck and then drift off. Good plan but the drift dive consisted of travelling over a mostly bleak sandy bottom!

We just got bored!

So why load up a boring video, well it seems a shame to have a blank in my list of uploaded dives.

Or you can use the following link to go to the YouTube site:Lord Percy & Landing craft  

Diving at Babbacombe 1st October 2011

Not the best dive I have had at Babbacombe but I needed it after some months of not being underwater!

Mushroom rock was the best place by far with what I think were bream, a lobster nearby and interestingly a conger eel in a hole at just 10 Metres!

Or if  you prefer you can go to the YouTube link>Diving at Babbacombe 1st October 2011

Lobster Pot Diving 6th August 2011

This was one of those opportunities to dive in some really unusual places. My dive buddy Dan was contacted by friends of the family who operated a lobster fishing boat. Roger and Tony own and run the fishing boat Kll, their problem is the loss of a string of lobster pots!

Anyway they have a number of lost pots and hoped that we could retrieve them.

The Kll is not a dive boat and therefore we needed to sort out a plan to carry out the search and the location of the string of pots. The Kll has a satnav system that can record the position of the boat down to the nearest metre.

Therefore we had a meeting with Roger the skipper to plan out each phase of the dive:

The diving period

Dive entry

Search technique

Lobster pot recovery technique.

Dive recovery

Emergency measures.

The search techniques proposed by Roger was excellent with line being laid between two shot lines that would be in the same position as the missing lobster pots. Therefore all we had to do was to follow the newly laid line along the bottom until we found the pot line.

There was a secondary project during the dive and that was to record, by video, the seabed to discover the reason for the snagged and cut lobster pot lines.

Dan and I are what I would call experience divers and have dived in virtually zero viz without getting lost! Even so we did not undertake this dive lightly and both of use carried our normal complete set safety and retrieval equipment.

We located a pot line but not the right one. The one we had located was a very old one that had been lost many years ago. It is interesting the effort of picking up the pots and the resulting air consumption compared to a ‘normal’ slow relaxing dive.

So we have to hope for a better chance next year.

On the way back home we stopped off for a second shallow dive on a barge that Roger and Tony have in the past used as a place to ‘drop’ their pots. This proved to be an excellent and relaxing dive.

If you would like to watch the video on the Youtube website then clink on the following link:

 Lobster Pot Diving 6th August 2011

Diving on the Bomber 2nd August 2011

This posting of the dive is a bit late!

I have just started to number my dives on the videos now; I guess that I have reached a respectable number of dives that I can feel smug enough to number them. This is dive number 195 since I restarted diving, which I think is pretty cool.

This is now my third dive on the Bomber and I feel that we are not getting any closer to identifying the wreck. I fact I feet that we are getting further away from naming the plane, I put that down to Julian locating a further two engines!!

So then next time I dive on the Bomber I am going to place a ‘tag’ on them and go hunting for these two other engines.

Sadly the wreck has been “trawled” so the engines and one other major part of the wreck have been moved. That means any mental map that I may have had of the wreck is now useless.

Before the dive we had our pre dive briefing by Roy the skipper this was followed up by a detailed set of photos and drawings by Julian in a planned approach to identifying the wreck.

I was specifically looking for the lights on the wing for this dive, without success I may add. We did carry out some digging at what we felt was the wingtip but that did not reveal anything apart form reducing the viz!!

 

This dive was a threesome with my usual dive buddy Dan plus my son Will. The visibility was not bad but the big plus was that we caught three lobsters!

Or if you would like to watch the video in Youtube then click on the following link:
 Diving on the Bomber 2nd August 2011