Wendy Northway
Lesley and I were busy catching
up on the gossip as we headed out of Winsford when we saw a familiar convoy in
the layby. DaveG’s car its bonnet up
with 5 persons surrounding it, all sleeves rolled up, ready to get down and
dirty! Not a good sign! We turned round at our earliest, only to see
the convoy starting out – problem solved we reckoned! Oh well, as we passed the RIB again on the
55, no need to speed (Ariel, pls note!) as we can’t do anything till the boat
gets there.
We got as much of our kit
together as we could and waited in the car park for the boat to arrive. I phoned Steve to find out what was going on –
Dave had had a problem with his new tow vehicle and Steve had now bizarrely found
himself with a large orange object on the back of his!
‘We’ll be there before 10’ he
said with much confidence
As we gazed out at the empty car park
we remarked we could have had an extra hour or so in bed! Then the rumble of cars was upon us – is this
the boat? No, a cavalcade of a dozen or
more wrinkly walkers! Would they leave
us enough room for us to prep the boat?
The boat arrived and we quickly
got to work and we were Beacons bound in no time flat. I was down to dive with Sarah, but she had a
problem with her kit, losing a fin, which to cut a long story short, found me
clinging onto the side of the RIB as Steve dropped Lesley from his intended
threesome and thus I dived with Lesley.
We had a most peculiar dive. It
started well, descending onto kelp then a drift took us down into a very pretty
gulley, plastered with fine and fluffy red seaweeds, deadmens fingers and tiny yellow
and white spyrodeta anemones. The
current drifted us onto a reef with a large sulphurous yellow boring sponge
flanked by more feathery red sea weeds, then down onto a pebbly bottom where we
met a rather lazy cat shark. To our left
was a wall which we drifted by, then onto a reef with a yellow sponge - -hadn’t
we just seen that? Onto the pebbles we
met the same cat shark again then hit the wall! This circuit continued 3 or 4 more times –
the current washed us around! It wasn’t
just us – Dave and Alan also experienced the same, as did Ernie and Steve.
Returning to the boat, Mark
handsomely displayed the booty he’d found – a pink SMB reel
‘I’ll have it’ I eagerly
squealed, until DaveG confirmed it was actually orange – not interested. However Alan’s ears pricked up.
‘That’s mine!’ He cried.
It had fallen out of his BCD pocket on his descent.
‘Finders Keepers!’ Mark retorted – a remark he would regret
later on – stay tuned reader!
Last pair up, Steve and Ernie
also had booty to share – Sarah’s pink fin which not only brought a smile to
her face, but also to her dad’s as he didn’t need to splash out on lost
kit. We sped back to base stopping for a
quick sandwich and toilet stop (only with special permission….) and we headed
out again. Dave Humphries succumbed to the
cold and stood down; his buddy Mark also declined a second dive as both wanted to further their
boat handling experience.
Lesley and I descended on the
nearside of the Beacons to about 10m onto a rocky reef splattered with Deadmens’
fingers and a large common spider crab. A
slight current took us over rocks and reef covered with red algaes, lilac
nudibranchs, tufts of hornwrack and vases of dahlia anemones. A sizable lobster was spied under a crevice,
several cat sharks were happily swimming – it was lovely to see them meandering
rather than swimming away from us. We
drifted over barnacle encrusted rocks, all with their legs out capturing food,
a splendid bunch of Indian feather hydroids which added to the plumes of antennae
hydroids, plus lots of fluffy small stuff that at my age I’m finding increasing
difficult to hone in on! The majority of
our dive had been at 12m but towards the end, we found ourselves approaching
20m and decided that this wasn’t a very sensible profile so the call was made
to curtail. Shame it was such a
fantastic dive but live to dive another
day is one of my mottos.
We got back into the boat; Mark
was eating his words from earlier. Steve
and Ernie had sent up a lifting bag.
‘What could possibly be on the
end of it?’ the bemused crew had thought.
This was a thought that ran
through Steve’s mind as he saw a regulator sitting in the sand. The lost and found team started to dig away
at the buried hose. It was only Mark’s
pony complete with flag that he’d lost this time last year!
With his own words ringing in his
ears from earlier, Mark valiantly decided that he’d return the SMB reel to Alan
and dutifully accepted the kind return of his reserve gas supply!
We headed back to the car park
with the sun in our eyes, most of us dry but all of us having had a lovely day’s
diving in one of our favourite spots.
Roll on Ireland!
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