The Magic Garden
Oh the joy! After a glorious weekend of diving in Plymouth it was back to work on Monday, but that didn’t mean no more diving. Nope. We had a dive planned after work - a little shore dive, either at the spot I had seen mating sea hares the week before, or at a secret location on the north coast that my “local friends” knew about. As it was still weather conducive to the latter we headed north, leaving home just after 6pm.
A leisurely drive had us arrive in the little cove, whose name I am sworn to absolute secrecy over, in a short time, and we took a wander down to the water’s edge to admire the view. The sky was a flat, light grey and the sea was dead flat. There was only an old couple having a picninc by where the cars were parked and it was silent except for the lapping of the waves. Bloomin’ perfect!
The last diver arrived in his little Suzuki jeep shortly after and we kitted up. I had an interesting set of kit, as my tanks were basically empty after the weekend, but I did have a deco bottle that needed to be vented for O2 clean, so it was a single 12 on my back with 50bar in for suit and wing, and a 7l ali bottle of 50% side slung to breath. It actually worked quite nicely for a dive in which we didn’t exceed 10m.
So, 10m maximum. Doesn’t sound that exciting, does it? Well, it might not have been a thrill a minute, rock and roll dive, but it was one of the most beautiful dives I have ever done. A white sandy bottom reflected back the light, and the viz was at leat 10-12 meters. The sea colour seemed to veer between turquoise and blue, and the overall effect was of being somewhere tropical. Only the cool sensation of 15 degree water flushing in my hood gave away the true location.
Rocks that had tumbled from cliffs above formed a border to the sandy cove, and in 5 metres they were covered with a brilliant proliferation of seaweeds in every colour and shade. It was this section that has lead me to refer to the site as The Magic Garden, as that is just the image it left me with. A reef across the mouth of the cove was topped by bullsblood coloured kelp, upon which swarmed what must have been thousands of tiny nudibranchs. In places they gathered en masse to eat the white bryazoean mat that coatsed the kelp fronds, whilst in others they were scattered apart. Everywhere you looked however you saw 10 or more in your field of vision.
Hunkered down in the stems were territorial wrasse and spider crabs. The odd lobster pot had caught nothing more than velvet swimming crabs, despite every other crevice in the larger rocks seeming to offer shelter to increasingly large lobster. The largest of these was found in a gully on the far side of the reef and he had claws that must have been a good 8 inches long.
As we reached the end of the reef I signalled to my friend that I had reached my turn point on my 7l and we tracked back. He took me a slightly different route over the kelp and we made our way back up the other side of the cove. The sand crawled with small critters, shoals of fry darted in the light shallows and almost invisible shrimp hung around, seeing what may turn up for lunch. My computer stopped logging the time at 63 minutes as we were now shallower than 1.5, but that didn’t stop us as there was still so much to look at, and I was so happy just lying around, examing whatever sbmarine flora and fauna presented itself in front of me. I finally broke the surface by kneeling up.
This was a tremendous dive and I can’t wait to go back and take C. She sat this one out as she was tired after a hard week of work and then a weekend of boat diving. She will love it though. But don’t tell the Emmetts…..
