Location: Brixham

28th of August 2005 to 28th of August 2005

DIVE REPORT – BRIXHAM (28th AUGUST 2005)

It’s not often the words “excellent” and “diving” appear in a sentence when you are talking about bubbling around Brixham Breakwater, but without any exaggeration we had two cracking dives!

Friday night arrived and it was decision time regarding going to our planned dive site of Thurlestone. The forecast was 20mph South to South Westerlies (straight into the beach) which, coupled with the rather inclement weather during the week, would have made the viz at Thurlestone something akin to French onion soup. We also had three new divers doing their first sea dives and seeing something would have been a distinct advantage. So I opted for the easy bail out option of Brixham (maybe to early as things panned out).

Cometh the day and cometh the best weather we have seen for a while! Not the forecast “cloudy day with sunny spells” but glorious sunshine all day and the wind we were expecting turned out to be nothing more menacing than the collective breeze of old men after a good curry (I know I am one!!). However, the conditions were fantastic.

Bev, Chappie and Tony all duly arrived burdened with the apprehension of having to get in the sea for the first time (well in England anyway),”Will it be cold? Will it be dark? Will I see anything at all? And of course “You want me to dive with who?!!! Now I know you’re having a laugh!”

Martin, Jo, Ollie and the rest pitched up along with Simon and his brother Tim and Alex and Kevin. Special words of thanks must be given to Wendy because she and Kevin had gone away to a very romantic upmarket mobile home site overlooking Burgh Island to celebrate their wedding anniversary and, luckily for us, Kevin just so happened to have his diving gear along with him……result.

So we had our brief and everyone buddied up and jumped in. I dived with Bev, Kevin with Chappie, Alex with Tony, Martin with Jo. Kim with Ollie and Caroline with Simon.

The viz was about 8 – 10m and the breakwater was looking really good with the sunlight on it. Martin and Jo found a rather spooky area where hundreds of spider crabs had met their doom and then, a few more fin strokes away, hundreds of spider crabs feeding. They reported seeing a spider crab with a carpice the size of a very large dinner plate which any sane man would view with the suspicion of a course fisherman saying he had caught a ten foot long roach! However, this monster from the deep was confirmed when Simon and Caroline returned from their second dive (Simon decided to pick a fight with it and rather unsurprisingly found himself buddy less for a short while!).

Bev, Chappie and Tony all acquitted themselves well, saw far more than I think they expected (I had to wait months before I saw my first cuttlefish!) and even managed to get some training in but boy are these guys buoyant! Chappie needing 16kg of weight and Tony a mear14kg………….hope you don’t have to walk too far to dive in the future fellas.

A great day was had by all and my thanks go to all who turned up and especially to the other instructors who made my life so much easier (Ok I’ll get the beer in later), and it just goes to prove that you can’t write anywhere off as a bad dive!!

P.S. Kevin, are you sure this is the road to Cornwall?

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