A Weekend at Swanage - April 06
Armed with a much larger dry suit to cater for my increased girth I set off to meet up with Helen in Swanage. We had arranged this via the internet diving forum Yorkshire Divers.
First on the agenda was the Fleur de Lys. I was a little nervous as the dry suit I had hired having the increased inches round the girth that I required, also had inches on the legs that I didn’t want! I had been worrying about migration of air and feet first rapid ascents to the point I had even dreamt about it! However all was well and despite having rather floaty feet in comparison with normal it all went well. Visibility was pretty poor round the wreck with lots of detritus in the water so none of the photos came out well but I was pleased for the opportunity to dive this small wreck as I had never got round to it in the past. It’s a nice little fishing boat (16.4M) that was finally abandoned in Swanage Bay after an attempt to tow it to Poole. A huge shoal of bib were sitting one side of the wreck and a number of other fish, crabs and a lobster, which soon disappeared from sight, were inside.
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We did a couple of dives under the Pier, including a jaunt over to the old Pier. I had been looking forward to this thinking that I’d get a good chance to take quite a few shots, I had seen a lot of life under there in the past, not only on the sea bed but growing up the pier legs.
However, I was rather disappointed. Previously I had seen the seabed littered with small gobys and crabs etc but this weekend there was a definite dearth of life around. I had also been hoping that the pier would be covered with dead mens fingers again so would be easy to photograph, but there seemed to be none. But I did manage to get a couple of reasonable shots of some snake locks anemones. I love these anemones they are one of my favourites and I was only sorry that they were not the green ones with pink tips…..some people are never satisfied!
As the Mary Jo had engine trouble our dive the next day was transferred to Sidewinder. Another nice small hard boat, but lacking the hot choccy after the dive! We had a superb slow drift dive over Pevril Ledges and saw some lovely things including two dogfish so intertwined we came to the conclusion they were mating. As it was a drift dive we had not taken the cameras which was a shame as it wasn’t fast and the two dog fish were absolutely stock still and didn’t move a muscle as we swam round them. Despite wearing artic xerotherms on top of normal xerotherms I did get very cold on this dive (temp 10) and really noticed the difference between wearing a neoprene and membrane suit.
However a very successful weekend with some nice dives and some practise with my new DSMB…..makes life so much easier having a crack bottle!
