Plymouth, 10th – 12th March 2006
The motley crew - Bob, Jess, Amanda, G, Caleb, Alana, Vicky, Matt O, Chris, Ashley, Jim, and Cat.
The trip!
Friday 10th March saw us setting off from Cardiff in the venerable beast that is an Arrow Hire Renault mini bus - a shocking piece of automotive design, the bottom scraping the speed bumps at Talybont even unladen! It did have a CD player though! All aboard at 6pm for the hop down to Plymouth.
We quickly settled in to the B+B, run by the Skipper and his wife, Pete and Pam, along with their wonderful dog! A quick walk down the hill (unfortunately uphill on the way home) led us to one of the local pubs to meet up with Ashley and Chris who'd made their own way down.
Saturday
Breakfast early for 8am ropes off. The plan was to head out to Eddystone Reef, approximately 10miles south of Plymouth, and a famous lighthouse position. This site is ideal as divers can pick their depths - 20m for the Ocean Divers and trainee Dive Leaders accumulating leading dives; Sports Divers and above could head down to 30m (no one had ponies.) With the sea a little lumpy on the way out, a couple of nameless individuals(!) ended up feeding the fishes over the stern, but everyone elected to dive. And a cracking dive it was too, even with a bit of underwater surge everyone enjoyed themselves. Recovery back onto the boat was brilliant and far too easy due to the skipper's lift on the stern!
After a cuppa and lunch, a second dive for those feeling up to it was made on the James Eagan Layne, one of the most-dived wrecks in UK waters. Five divers stayed dry due to seasickness or leaky drysuits, whilst those getting wet had a typically good dive on the Layne.
Sunday
With the wind picking up over night, and following a routine call to the Coastguard to check the weather, the decision was made to only dive within the breakwater. This is a big benefit of diving in Plymouth, as you can usually always get in the water, regardless of the weather.
We headed off to dive the fort built just inside the breakwater, used as a training building to train commercial divers, with lots of random bits and pieces underwater used to practice welding/cutting/salvage techniques. Although very silty, nudibranchs, squat lobsers, and a congar were seen, and some divers had the dive signed off as a "low visibility" dive - a training requirement for progression to their next qualification, and others practiced DSMB (delayed surface marker buoy) deployment, again a training requirement.
A select group of divers decided to give the diving a miss, and instead headed off into the delights of Plymouth, and graced a pub/restaurant with their presence, and ate nice puddings!
Meanwhile, back on the boat...! In the low viz of the first dive, one of the diver's torches was lost, so the second dive now turned into a search and recovery challenge, but unfortunately for the incumbent concerned, was unsuccessful, although a couple of dogfish were seen!
Diving finished, we packed the bus, and headed for home for a well earned rest.
Jerry's Final Thought
Diving this early in the season is always hit and miss due to the weather, but we were very lucky to have made it out to Eddystone Reef!
Originally this trip was planned to be for Sports Divers or above only, as this would have meant (conditions permitting) that we could have dived wrecks up to 35m in depth. However to fill the trip it was opened up to Ocean Divers, which restricted our sites to those with a 20m bottom, or sites where divers could choose their depth according to their qualification limits. The benefit to this was the same people wanting to dive the deeper sites also needed dive leading dives (leading someone less qualified than themselves - e.g. an Ocean Diver) to progress to the Dive Leader qualification, and were able to get these.
