Scylla & James Egan Layne
The weekend started off as normal, a Friday evening dive out of Falmouth ended up in the channel collecting a few Scallops for tea. Saturday I ended up doing a shore dive on Pendennis Point in Falmouth with a newly qualified diver, he wanted to try UK diving after qualifying in Sharm in February. He really enjoyed it and wants to do more. Saturday night I was off to Plymouth for a couple of dives on Sunday with Tim. Continue reading this entry »
Stanwood, Great Eastern & the Epsilon
Another few dives completed. Two on the Stanwood, one on Thursday morning, Shaun had a group together and wanted to fill the boat. The original plan was the Hera, but as we passed St Antony’s headland the swell was a little large for the newbie’s on board. Shaun turned the boat and announced we were diving the Stanwood, I hadn’t dived the Stanwood for a while so it’d do. Off we went, a few pictures before the newbies appeared then go and find some Scallops. I’ve been promising my dad some Scallops for ages and they were coming round that evening.
Friday evenings dive was, to my surprise, the Stanwood again. The vis wasn’t so good this time as the tide was ebbing which brings the crap down the estuary. A few more Scallops.
Sunday, there’s a little dived wreck called the great eastern locally although no-one actually knows it name. Rumours that the bell was raised years ago with the name of a woman followed by a letter like ‘Annie B’ or something like that. The vis on the surface was bad due to the amount of plankton around, not surprising as the sea was 13 degrees at the surface. As we descended it started to clear and was probably 10m near the bottom, and 10 degrees too. It was to be a short dive to 62m, I’m still getting used to the rebreather at depth, but changing a few things last time made the whole thing feel really comfortable. On the return the next group were ready to go out, I asked how many and how deep. Only 5 on the Epsilon, max depth 25m, I could stay on if I wanted. So I decided to stay on board. We headed out and I jumped in first, I had over 2 hours surface interval and the box gave me 47 minutes of no deco time so that was plenty. I swam around the boilers having a look at the congers inside them, the odd piece of wreckage sticking out of the sand and a few steel plates lying around. I then headed off onto the sand to see what was there, more Scallops! It was getting a little shallower and the box was giving me loads of no deco time but the others on the boat were probably up by now, so I joined them.
A week of diving! Odd days anyway.
Well it all started over easter. I went out on Westbay Lass on Friday and did two dives. The first was a shallow reef where he had a big hit on the magnetometer. I swam around for 30 minutes and never found anything! I only decided to do this dive as we had got to the dive site before slack water, it passed enoug time to get slack water on the Mohegan.
I’ve dived the Mohegan loads of times and never found much, there’s loads of broken pottery on it and theer is reports of portholes, but I’ve never seen them. We hit it on slack and had some reasonable visibility, probably around 6m. We started swimming to where Ben has been finding all sorts of bits. I mean bits, I did find half a copper flange and a whole trim tile, I doubt if there is really much more there, it’s been dived far too often.
That evening I went out on the usual Friday night dive on Shaun’s Autumn Dream, a drift in the channel, the usual Scallop collecting and then back home.
Saturday was a deeper one, Ben Rein in 61m, originally we had planned the Bretonne but due to conditions we changed to teh Ben Rein. The wreck was hard to find as it is only 32m long.
Sunday we had a rest.
Monday I managed to get a go on the new Pelagian Rebreather, I’ll do a post on that seperately, it was only a shore dive at Seal Cove in Newquay. We swam around and went into the cave there, quite a big cave that’s only in 5m of water. We went looking for seals but never found any.
This is just a brief account as I have been really busy, with so many different things.