Diving - My Continuing Adventures underwater
Swanage Wrecks
Fortunately my next diving was on a couple of c.30M wrecks from Swanage.
We arrived around 8AM and just managed to get the (what looked like) final place on the pier and met up with some of the others who'd arrived.
Amazingly, both Caroline and Seadhna who arrived even later managed to be squeezed onto the pier as well, so no-one had the long walk to and from the car park above the pier, a relief for everyone.
The forecast was for rain and then brightening, although getting windier, so it was a pleasant surprise to head out to our first dive, on the Aeolian Sky, under sunny skies and with almost flat seas.
It's a 40-60 minute ride to the Sky from Swanage, but in the good conditions we were there in the shorter time and a thin cloud covering on arrival meant it took the heat off as we kitted up.
I had to dive with one of our newly qualified Sports Divers and so had abandoned plans to dive with my twinset as I knew he only had a 15L cylinder.
We dropped in and descended, passing Caroline and her daughter Isobel at about 6M, as Issy was having trouble clearing her ears.
We reached the wreck at around 25M, suppposedly near the accommodation block, but it was hard to recognise the structure as I recalled it from earlier dives.
We dropped down to the seabed alongside the wreck, at 31M, where the water was a toasty 18C!
Some video from my dive on the Aelion Sky
We swam around the stern area and then moved forward along the wreck for around 20 minutes, before Dave indicated he was down to 70 Bar, so I put up my DSMB and we started to surface.
Somehow he managed to get through 50 bar on the way to the surface (his analogue gauge actually read empty!), which was strange, but I think he was finding monitoring his ascent quite stressful.
Back on Vyper, Bryan made us all a hot drink and everyone seemed to have had a reasonable dive except Caroline who moaned about the terrible vis.
While it wasn't crystal clear, it wasn't particularly dark and the rest of us thought it was around 5M vis.
A happy group of divers
We had, as is often the way, a long break between getting back from the first dive to our second, so people changed and had a leisurely lunch and few hours in the pleasant weather.
Swanage was very busy, partly due to a 'wild swimming festival', but also with day trippers and holidaymakers.
The weather was excellent for diving - Warm, but not too hot, and calm
I had lunch at Gee Whites and then treated myself to my regular ice cream from the excellent Fortes gelateri near the theatre.
At 17:50 we went out on Mary Jo (Swanage Boat Charters' smaller boat) to the Kyarra.
There was a little wind and swell, but nowhere near as bad as the forecast had suggested and we quickly got in the water when we arrived.
The light was better on the Kyarra, although I reckoned the vis was about the same.
Andy, the skipper, had mentioned the boilers and bow as good places to visit in his briefing, so I decided to go towards the stern to avoid the crowd.
We quickly found the engine and then, following a prop shaft reached the steering quadrant and the empty propeller stub.
We then turned back and headed towards the bow, taking in the empty portholes, bollards and plenty of other sites on the wreck.
I think we more or less reached our entry point when Dave indicated it was time to go up, but he struggled to release his reel from a d-ring (I did it in the end) and then to fill his DSMB (I did that too!), but we got it done and he seemed to be reeling it in at a careful pace, but as we reached our safety stop point at 6 metres, he seemed to accelerate.
Dave is a big bloke and I figured I had no chance of stopping him as he accelerated towards the surface, seemingly making no effort to vent gas.
I decided to stop and release my own DSMB and complete my safety stop before surfacing.
When I did, I couldn't see Dave initially, but as the boat drew closer I could see he was already back aboard, seemingly none the worse for his uncontrolled ascent, although we had a chat and he acknowledeged he needed to get some more practice in with deploying a DSMB, in a safer environment, before undertaking any other deeper sea dives.
Everyone had had a decent dive, except poor Issy, who hadn't been able to clear her ears at all on this dive and returned to the boat after only going down a few metres.
Caroline had joined another group after seeing her safely back onboard and she even managed to find a bit of treasure, a pipe!
The pipe Caroline found on the Kyarra.
It was a long day, rising at 5AM and getting home around 9:30PM, but, even with the limitations of a less experienced buddy, I'd enjoyed being back in the sea and diving on some substantial wrecks.
Once again, I'd used my Hunter drysuit, but on both dives it had leaked through the right wrist seal to some extent (more on the first than second), but I think I had just had a problem getting the seal properly flat.
The following weekend we were off to Scotland to dive at St Abbs with the club and my Seaskin suit was still in for repairs, requiring a new zip, so I'd be able to see if the problem recurred there.
North of the border - Diving at St Abbs.
Someone (Caroline, I suspect, as she'd been there before) suggested we try diving in St Abbs, in southern Scotland.
I wasn't enthusiastic initially, but Mandy and I had often talked of taking a holiday in Northumberland and visiting some of the many castles there, notably Bamburgh, and when I suggested we do so, combining it with a couple of days' diving, she wasn't against the idea, so in late July we made the over 400 mile journey to Berwick Upon Tweed where we stayed for a week, taking in Mandy's sister's for a couple of days and a flying visit to Whitby to visit the Abbey.
You can read about our holiday elsewhere, but on the Saturday we drove the 15 miles or so to meet up with the other 11 club members who'd made the trip and were staying in St Abbs.
When I asked what the accommodation was like I was mostly met with grimaces, so I was happy we had a clean and comfortable bungalow a few miles away to stay in!
I did 4 boat dives and a shore dive over the weekend. Others squeezed in an early morning shore dive on the Sunday morning, but no-one elected to do more shore diving on the Monday as some had originally planned, because, frankly, shore diving at St Abbs is horendous! The entry and exit is over slippery, treacherous rocks that could easily tear a dry suit or break a bone or two and the wide tide range means that you sometimes have near moutaineering to reach the sea or safety.
The first boat dive was to a site named as "Anemone Gullies" and, like all the others, was less than 15 minutes boat ride from the harbour.
Getting on the boat required our equipment to be craned down to the boat as we were at low tide and then we all had to negotiate a vertiginous ladder to the deck of the boat.
Once onboard, though, there was plenty of space and the short trip meant we spent nearly all of it readying for the dive.
For the saturday boat dives, I dived with Phil, who joined the club last year, but had progressed quickly and is a good diver.
We dropped in and found ourselves in excellent vis (around 10 Metres, maybe more) and with bright colourful sea flora and fauna in the rocks.
Dive at the Anemone Gullies including the Wolf Fish
To be honest, though, it all looked much of a muchness after a while and while there were plenty of crabs and lobsters around and the usual selection of fish, I didn't find anything particularly exciting until towards the end of the dive when I spotted a fish tail flick behind a rock ledge just ahead of me. I didn't recognise it as any of the other fish types we'd seen on the dive to that point, so swam across and was greeted by a Wolf Fish sitting on the rock.
Wolf Fish's cheery grin!
Apparently, this is very unusual as they usually hide in crevices, with just their wonky toothed heads visible.
Better still, it stayed still long enough for me to swim slightly around it to get the full side on view with my camera, before it swam off.
Definitely the highlight of the dive and I assumed others must have seen them too, but it turned out only our pairing had and, disappointingly, it remained the only sighting of the trip!
We returned to St Abbs harbour and unloaded our cylinders, so that they could be filled before the second dive at Thistly Briggs.
This dive was notable mainly for the swim through between two rock walls at the start of the dive.
After that, it was mostly more of the same underwater landscape, although Phil pointed out a strange looking creature late in the dive.
Dive at Wuddy Rocks, including the Monk Fish
It looked like a ray, but not any ray I'd ever seen before and it turned out to be a Monk Fish (a type of Angler fish). I'd seen pictures, but was surprised how large it was, assuming it was more the size of a plaice.
Again, only Phil and I spotted anything as interesting as that on this dive, so people started saying we were the lucky pair.
People were keen to do a shore dive, so we headed around the harbour wall to wear some other divers had been entering the water earlier.
Getting in wasn't easy, but Andrew and I (paired up for this dive) managed to get in and tried to follow Caroline and Issy towards Cathedral Rock.
The challenge of shore diving at St Abbs
However, Justyna, who was diving with Andy (not the Andrew I was diving with) and had abandoned the morning dive with ear problems, again couldn't descend and Andy let her surface alone.
I wasn't keen on this, so Andrew and I ascended to make sure that people on the shore knew where she was and that they could get her safely out of the water.
After we descended, we swam as a pair for a while, amongst a lot of kelp and rocks, until we found Andy, Phil and John diving together around a large rock.
It didn't turn out to be Cathedral Rock (it has an arch in it), but we explored it a bit before trying to head back towards where we'd entered.
Our shoredive - No sign of Cathedral Rock!
It turned out that we'd swum to far to the right nearing our exit point and had a bit of a surface swim back, but, although the exit was more difficult than the entry we got out safely.
The others finally turned up after a slightly longer than planned dive and some really struggled to get out of the water.
I decided there and then that my shore diving at St Abbs was done.
We all decamped to a pub in a nearby village (there's next to nothing in St Abbs itself) and had an excellent meal before Mandy and I drove back to Berwick.
Some of us at the pub - Justyna's photo
We had some rain (the only significant rain of our trip to the North East) overnight, but it was only drizzling slightly at times by the time I arrived back at St Abbs the next morning, having dropped Mandy off to do a walk.
A few of us (not me) had done an early morning shore dive, most memorable for 'rock climbing in dive gear', apparently.
On a low tide, entry and exit is even more challenging!
The skipper had decided to do two trips with another group before our first dive, so we didn't get onto the boat until about 1PM.
People were keen to explore Cathedral Rock after all but Caroline and Izzy had missed it the previous afternoon, so we went there for the first dive.
I dived with new Sports Diver, Claire, on Sunday and, as soon as we dropped in we could see the twin arches of Cathedral Rock.
We swam through the top, smaller arch first and then turned around to go through the larger, lower one. I could feel a slight current pushing me back, but it wasn't too bad.
Finally, we find Cathedral Rock!
Once through we started to swim around the rock in a clockwise direction, eventually meeting everyone else coming the other way!
We continued around, but finally came to a point where we were in a cul-de-sac, so we had to swim up to around 3M, across the top of the rock and the dropped back down to find ourselves back at the point we'd entered.
As we kitted up, the skipper had pointed out a couple of seals in the water, so Claire and I headed in the direction we'd seen them, but we never did spot them.
Claire indicated she was at 70 Bar, so I put up my DSMB, somehow managing to do it wrong-handed, but I managed to avoid a rapid ascent and we safely surfaced and rejoined the boat.
The arches had been nice, but the dive was fairly uneventful beyond that.
For the final dive, we headed back out to near the site of our second dive, this time diving Black Carr.
Again, it proved a fairly ordinary dive. The scenery was much the same, we saw a few schools of fish, but mostly it was a mixture of rock, soft corals, sea urchins, kelp and other flora.
The dive at and near Black Carr
To be honest, I recall little of interest on the dive and, if I'm honest, I'd not bother returning to St Abbs, although it is nice to say that I've dived there and the Wolf Fish and Monk Fish sightings on day one were firsts for me.
Without those (and the rest of our holiday), though, I think I'd consider the diving a bit of a wasted journey.
