Sunday 29 January 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  

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