September – October 2009

Inside this Issue

1. Message from diver Dicky

2. 2009 Diving

3. Sunday Nights

4. Pool Rota

5. Diving Medicals

6. Diver reports

7. Pool Costs

8. Marc’s Training Update & Latest Qualifications

1. Message from Diver Dicky

The dive season draws to a close and the highlight was the club’s trip to the Scillies – first time in my diving career. If anyone else has been doing any diving or has any contributions to the newsletter then please let me have some material. You only have to write a few words similar to what goes in a dive log – when, where and what you saw – was it any good?  Don’t worry too much about content and grammar, it can be jazzed up! It is edited and proof read by Karen’s mum before issue anyway. Don’t forget to check out our new website. Cheers Diver Dicky

2. 2009 Diving

Location	Boat	Date	Dive Opens
Littlehampton	Michelle Mary	18th October

3. Sunday Nights

Pool session (8-9pm), then drinks 9.15 ish in the bowling club (behind pool). Meet other club members, all are welcome and we hardly talk about diving! Lectures held in the same place before pool sessions.

4. Pool Rota

Thanks to all who do the pool rota – collecting pool fees and acting as dry pool side supervision.  PLEASE try to make your turn so people don’t miss out on a swim because they have to do the pool rota.  If you can’t do it let someone know. You should get a text reminder on the Saturday before it’s your turn.

5. Diving Medical Certificate

Club rule – everyone supplies one to Peter (Memberships) prior to going on a club dive. Either done as a self cert, with your G.P, or a dive doctor. Any yes’s on a self cert and you need a proper dive medical. Try Doctor Dave Rogers 01277 373974 in Brentwood (was £50 – 2008).

6. Dive reports

Devon September 2009 (by Diver Dicky)

Brixham Breakwater Beach & Babbacombe beach – Shore Diving.

Brixham Breakwater Beach is an important shore dive site largely because it is so accessible, safe and usually diveable unless N, NE or E winds blow it out.  Breakwater beach is well known to dive clubs up country and is ideal for all sorts of dive training. Shore entry is straightforward from the pebble beach. Good car park facilities – although not cheap in season. Café (daytime) and toilets. Depths of up to 10m, with little current to worry about. A lot of sea life – sole, scallops, pipefish, crabs and so forth.
There are three fairly different dives here but if your navigation and air consumption is good, you can do all three on one hit! At its most basic, you can go left, right, or straight out from the beach. No real hazards of note here, except fishermen (more of that later).

I had the pleasure to dive with a guy from Totnes BSAC. This was my first UK shore dive on a Saturday evening and it’s quite weird standing by the edge of the sea in a dry suit when normally you are on a boat. We did our buddy checks and my buddy realised he had left his compass in the car so asked me to navigate. No pressure then! Fortunately the directions were fairly basic fin north then east then south with a bit of west. It seems that if you venture too far west you will meet the boulders of the breakwater and too far east you will enter the kelp zone on the rocks below the cliffs.

We headed straight out from the beach over some rocks and had an easy bimble over a varied sand/pebble/mud sea bed. Depending on the substrate (new word for you) there were sea-weeds, snakelocks anemones, masked crabs, scallops, sea grass, nudibranchs, velvet swimmer crabs, pipefish, wrasse, cuttlefish, white crabs (porcelain?), hermit crabs to name but a few. Depth is usually a maximum of 12m, with no currents to worry about we managed 7-8m.

The viz was pretty good with 3 -4m viz and clear water. We saw cuttle fish within a few minutes and plenty of other smaller critters.  After sort of navigating for 30 minutes we headed back south west towards the breakwater, which is about half a mile long and constructed with a base of large limestone boulders. We spent the last part of the dive on the breakwater where the life was varied. Juvenile pouting and blennies lurking amongst the rocks.

As we headed back to the shallows we later found that a fisherman had noticed our bubbles and presumed there was a very large fish in the vicinity so started to cast his line. He got a bit of a surprise when two black clad creatures surfaced yards from the beach. ‘Bloody divers’ was all he could say. And before you ask did we have an SMB up – no, apparently they are a pain to drag around on a shore dive and they get tangled in fishing lines!
My buddy swam like a torpedo so by the end of the 50 minute dive and after struggling to get fins off at the end of the dive I was tired but really buzzing. We surfaced to a beautiful dusk sky and I had just dived somewhere I’d wanted to dive for ages having seen so many divers go out from the beach.

I was due to go out on Totnes BSAC’s rib to dive round Berry Head, which was a dive site I’d seen on a chart a few years ago and thought – I wonder what that’s like. Alas the southerly winds put paid to that but after waiting a few minutes, I got a call from someone asking if I wanted to do a shore dive – course I do I replied.

Babbacombe Beach

I met another bloke in a car park (sounds dodgy when you put it like that) at Babbacombe beach. This is a good site for novices, training and night dives. This was the only dive on offer in the area and soon there were a number of divers kitting up. Babbacombe is awkward at low water but good in most conditions except north east and easterly winds. Depths are up to 10m. Access is via a very steep road so you need good brakes. Good facilities on site – toilets, café, a pub and air fills. There is car parking adjacent to the beach but you need to arrive early during the peak season and at weekends.
Depths and Currents – Entry from the shore provides a gently sloping sea bed which is strewn with small rocks but easily managed. Once in the water the dive can reach a maximum of around 15m depending on the state of the tide. The tidal range will vary from as little as 1.5m on neap tides to approximately 4.5m on springs. There are no appreciable currents adjacent to the shore but divers should be aware of currents up to 1 knot if they venture more than 500m from the beach.

There are 3 types of dive to do, of which we did a bit of each. We entered down the steps at the end of the pier. Initially we planned to snorkel to deeper water then descend (good job I packed my snorkel) but then we decided to drop down in the shallows swimming over kelp and rocks to the sea bed. Again there is the need to avoid fishermen but no SMB this time. My buddy said only need it if there’s a lot of boat traffic and you don’t plan on surfacing near the beach. There are also quite a few mooring lines which make entanglement a danger.

The bay’s bottom is a mixture of shale, rock, sand, mud and shingle with clumps of reef and rocks, especially round the headlands. There’s a crescent shaped reef which indicates you are getting to the shallows and some rocks known as the mushrooms.

Towards the end of the dive my buddy did get tangled with a fisherman’s tackle, luckily the line was thin and broke easily leaving the float to drift away, another happy fisherman! We managed about 7-8m and ended up diving for 1hr 25 minutes (my longest ever dive by some way). We saw tons of stuff, I didn’t realise there were more than three types of crab (edible, spider and velvet swimmers) I must have seen several other types, all relatively small. Sometimes it helps diving with a photographer (they are not all bad) who took time pointing things out. Some I would never had even seen or guessed. Saw a pipefish which actual looked like a sea snake curled up round a shell on the sea bed. My buddy was pointing out all kinds of critters and despite the fact there was no metal in sight, this was a thoroughly enjoyable dive. We saw balan wrasse, crabs, sponges, sea cucumbers, anemones, fan worms. We also saw a John Dory towards the end of the dive and spent some time watching it, it was happy to pose for the camera.
I’ve now done two UK shore dives and I must admit they were thoroughly enjoyable and beat a nondescript south coast drift any day of the week.

Scillies dive report September 2009

A first venture to the Scillies for most of us certainly for the last 10 years.
We boarded the boat “The Evert” from Newlyn and after a night on board headed to St Michaels Mount for the first dive. A nice wreck dive to start the weekend off “The Alice Marie”. We then headed for the Scillies. Fortunately the weather was good and the crossing not too rough. Once in the lea of the islands things settled down, but because of the wind direction we couldn’t get to do the east coast wrecks. Instead we had a scenic dive – mainly rocks and kelp (St Mary’s Rocks). Not spectacular, as I think we all expected a bit more.

We spent the night in Hugh Town, St Mary’s main town, where we ferried in a tiny dinghy from the boat to the harbour wall. The return trip in the dark, was an experience heading out a few hundred metres to a tiny speck of a light (the boat)!

The weather was super in the Scillies for the two days we were there. Clear blue skies and sunshine, just a shame the wind was from the wrong direction. We had a wreck dive on two wrecks in one (Hathor and Plympton) which was enjoyable, very good visibility and some life on this dive.

The second dive was a battered up wreck “Lady Charlotte” in kelp and rock,  sometimes you struggled to find the metal bits. Not much life on the more scenic dives. Although Rebecca and I had a dogfish land between us and certainly made me jump as it came from nowhere.

On the second night in the Scillies we moored up by the quay so it was not too difficult getting ashore. Another night spent in a pub where we had a carvery.

In hindsight we made a wrong decision, getting up at 5.30am to do a wreck dive “The Cita”, an infamous wreck which has only been down 12 years. We had gone to bed early and first thing in the morning we were kitting up in the dark. The sun was on its way up. Half of us jumped in but we struggled to reach the shot line, as first we couldn’t even see it in the troughs of the waves. Some of us, the fit ones! made it to the buoy. However it was decided to call the dive off as it was extremely rough. We then had a struggle swimming away from the shore to the boat. We’ve done a lot of surface swimming this weekend! After crawling on the boat and back to bed for a few hours we headed back to Cornwall and did two wreck dives around the Penzance area. The second was a return dive to the Alice Marie. Both wrecks had a lot of life on them, a lot more than the Scillies.

Overall it was an interesting weekend. It made a change to go somewhere different but the diving was disappointing. Mainly because we couldn’t get on the decent wrecks because of the wind direction. Shame as the weather overall was pretty good.

Some of us stayed the night on the boat and enjoyed some scrummy pies in a pub in Newlyn before the long drive home the next day.

Littlehampton October 2009

We went to Littlehampton in October so Adam and Ian could carry out their first sea dives. It was a nice sunny day and the sea was flat calm. We dived the “Indiana” which is the first time we have dived this wreck and it was one of the best dives of the year. There were lots of very large conger eels and lots of fish life on this wreck. You almost had to push your way past them. The visability was excellent 8-10m. An excellent dive.
The subsequent drift dive was a bit dull with only a competition to collect the most dogfish spicing things up. Apart from dogfish there were hardly any other fish, just sand and stones. Ian and Adam coped very well with their first sea dives – well done to you both.

7. The Pool – Covering the Costs

With a lack of new diver/student training we are desperate for ways of increasing pool revenue, so other than rescue skills review, testing kit, practicing skills, swimming (not everyone’s cup of tea), octopush (hooray!) and TRY DIVES if anyone has any ideas suggest them.

Ultimately TRY DIVES (£15 for a full 1 hour or £10 for ½ hour) are the best way to help cover the pool costs. So if you know of anyone young or old, a group, a club or an organization who might want to try scuba diving then let me know. Our instructors and assistants get satisfaction out of seeing someone try something new and really enjoy it so it’s a two way thing as well.

8. Marc’s training update and latest qualifications

Becks, Adam and Tim have been doing their Ocean Diver training. Adam and Ian are now Sports divers. Tim has passed his Ocean exam. I will be arranging for those doing there dive leader lectures to attend the instructor foundation course in the early part of the new year.

9. The Clubs Website

The new website is up and running and is being tweaked constantly check it out!