Hello SUSAC,
hope you are all well and getting wet on a regular basis!?
Here is the latest installment in my South West dive adventure:
We've been having such a poo time with the strong winds here that it's been a bleeding miracle to get a dive in, but that's just what I managed to do this afternoon.
The dive site is Eastern Kings; between the entrance to Plymouth's continental ferry terminal and Europe's largest Naval base! As you can see from the Admiralty Chart, it's a bit risky as you need to swim well into the shipping channel. Thanks must go to the crew of HMS Turbulent for their patience and understanding!! (I swam with a nooclear sub again!!)
Here's the site:
Nice and close to base camp, this site must be dived at a precise tide. If it's dived any time after high tide there is a real chance of ending up in the path of very large Naval vessels! So we had to wait for Turbulent to pass, had a couple of dishy special forces chaps guarding the site from their ickle boat making sure we didn't jump the gun!! One of them called me a 'cheeky c**t' after I passed a comment to them. Did someone forewarn them I was coming!??
Anyhoo, the dive is a gentle (!) drift over a series of reefs cutting across the diver's path and disappearing down the steep slope into the sound. The start of the dive is a shallow bay down to 7m, extending 150m from the entry point (GREEN arrow). It would seem that, due to the calm water and increased temperatures in this area, this is a favoured site for cuttlefish. At the edge of the bay the seabed slopes off at a sharp angle into the sound, and it is here that the drift phase of the dive really begins. This part of the dive is home to big edible crabs and we saw a number of large specimens buried in the silt, peering at us as we flew overhead. After a few minutes of drifting, we arrived at the first reef. Cutting across our path, there's an explosion of colour as dahlia anemones jostled for space with dead men's fingers and sea stars. After this first reef we came to a series of ridges and gullies, all packed with life. Spider crabs stalked the seabed; wrasse, blennies, shannies and rockling darted over the reefs, and pollack wheeled overhead. The reefs disappear down to over 40m, but the best marine life is found in the first 20m. At about 18m my buddy Dan (not the Alert Network!) spotted a huge lobster. So why wasn't it promptly yoinked out it's hole and dropped in the mesh bag? Well apparently all the marine life here is full of some heavy metal (whose name escapes me, but it begins with a T....charlie??) from the china clay mines and naval base upstream of the site. Therefore unless you wanna be eating the paint from the bottom of a minesweeper, best to leave the life alone (however, it remains, the only good lobbie is a cooked lobbie! anyone remember Camilla? gosh she hurt me good!)
Towards the latter stage of the dive, as we moved into the shallows, there were large rocks the size of cars scattered along the seabed. These rocks, pitted and scarred by wave action and relatively uncolonised by seaweed, are frequented by shoals of bass. It was here that we saw an absolutely amazing sight, Dogfish galore!! I counted seven pairs of eyes all congregated in this one crevice in the rocks, all pointing in the same direction!! (why is that Linsey??) It was bizarre to see them all huddled together. We also saw two different coloured tompot blennies (begining to become my favorite SW critter!) and a nice pipefish. Saw some nice painted top shells, and I tried to break up a gang fight between some rival hermit crabs, but then I wimped out and left them to crack their shells open! crazy hermit dudes. So that's all I can remember just now, don't want to make you green round the edges, but this was where I was gonna take you Gus!! Blast this windy city!
I'm still available for mid-semester if you want to pay my travel expenses?!! Think I'm good for bus driving too!
Other news: I passed my HSE diver medical (this means I can become a saturation diver (£1500 a day!!?) Nah, not for me!) Hoping to test some divers soon once my study gets approval!
I'm waffling now, good night, god bless
G
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Shug
Sounds good Cheeky. The desription really made the reader think he was there - you should bring out a book.
Was the mystery metal Tin?
charlie
Excellent blog, cheeky!
Glad that the Navy have got you sussed already!
Like what you've done with the WLog profile. Did you make it into a jpeg file & add the other details in Photo Shop or similar? Are you going to upload all of your log pages onto some webspace?
Keep us posted on your diving activities!
We'd love to visit your part of the world and join you for some exciting boat diving.. yum yum!
cheeky_diver
trainee IT geek reveals all!
Hi Charlie,
I copied the tides, Wlog profile and BBC weather data into Powerpoint then saved it as a jpeg, then opened said jpeg with photobucket. I did manage to yoink Corel paint/photo etc from Plym Uni (thanks guys!) so will play about with that. But this is me playing with designs etc, I'd like to use my blogger.com account to include Admiralty chart (stole from uni again!) live.com satellite image, Wlog etc etc. The South West dives are so dependant on winds and tides I want to log as much info as possible to try and build up a knowledge base to stop me from travelling to sites to discover the site's been blown out.
Awaiting approval for Uni webserver space.... I do have scubapsychology.com, but can't do much with it (might just use it to redirect to uni site if I can|) .....plus I've discovered very quickly that many divers cannot spell psicology ! I need a catchy site name that I can convey verbally! 'scubastudy' maybe, do you know of any free domain name sites?? Will forward my uni server address as it comes!
Shug: tributyl tin (TBT) is apparently a synthetic compound that may/may not kill me if i eat the animals!
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