Scubamoose

Date : 31st May 2008 Time : 46mins

Depth : 12m Temp : 14 C

Ship rocks is a reef ledge a few miles south west of Brighton Marina, a site that my dive club regularly visits. The annual plankton bloom was definitely in full swing when I dived 10 days ago but on this dive it was obvious that it is starting to clear up. It has reached that stringy stage where I can see plankton strings which are two or three inches long and the visibility was between 3 and 4 metres depending on how much we kicked up the bottom !

So the viz was nice and at 12m it was good and bright due to the lovely calm and clear day on the surface. My buddy and I were diving with a buddy line, a bit strange you might think at a shallow depth in reasonable viz but then Mark Threadgold (google him) is a remarkable and thoroughly experienced diver especially considering the fact that he is completely blind. Everytime I watch him disappear over the side of a boat strapped to his modified rebreather I take my hat off to him. Or my neoprene hood as it were

We hopped over the side and descended to the bottom of the shot line. A few metres down I realised that I had not switched my computer into dive mode and quickly rectified that with a few button presses. When I got to the bottom of the shot line Mark was waiting for me. I grabbed his buddy line, clipped it on to my BC and watched him get his underwater digital camera out and switch it on. Yup, believe it or not this fella is into underwater photography! Funny thing was it didn’t look like it was switched on but then when he turned it to towards me to check, he was holding the lens against a black suit, so maybe that’s why I thought the black screen meant it was still switched off… (Unfortunately we didn’t figure that out until we got back to the surface, doh!)

Anyway, we bumbled along, exploring the reef ledge and headed up as planned 40 minutes into the dive. I made the decision to switch to my thin thermal before this dive as the temperature of the water has reached 14 C, it turned out to be a good choice. I shed a couple of kilos of weight and was still warm when I hit the surface after a 3 minute safety stop at 5 metres.

We saw lots of life on the dive. I spotted a whole load of shrimps hanging out in a hole and popped my head in to take a closer look… only to find a slightly startled congar staring back at me! There were lots of blennies about and plenty of wrasse hanging around, a couple of decent sized crabs too. I didn’t grab them even though they were looking a bit tasty. I didn’t see any lobsters though (my favourite!).

After getting all our kit back on the boat we headed of to No3 Bouy to check if there were any mussels hanging on the chain. On my way there I cast my mind back to last year when we cleaned one of the buoys and got the best mussles off it that I think I have ever had, they were delightfully big and juicy. So that scumptious memory was in my mind as the buoy came into site…