Babbacombe, Torquay

Date: Sunday 30th June 2013          Dive Number: 168
Place: Babbacombe, Torquay         Buddy: Andy P 
Time Down: 1100                           Dive Time: 01:00
Time Up: 1200                                 Max Depth: 8.0m
Visibility: 2-3m                               Water Speed: 1kn
Weather: SCT004 9999 F2             Entry: Pier Steps

You can see the remains of a crumbling house from Babbacombe Beach. It was bought for £150,000 as a holiday home. The buyers thought that was brilliant, so rushed the sale through without thinking about getting a survey or even going down to the bottom of the garden. After the price, it may have been the view that really sold it to them. How ironic. 

geograph.co.uk

It was a glorious morning. The sea was flat and the strong sunshine was breaking through the thinning stratus. Dogs were running after tennis balls on the beach, cars were shuffling into parking spaces and the first cups of tea were being purchased from the cafe in between strategic organisation of plastic furniture on the promenade, ready for a roaring day's trade. One diver came up to me and asked for his drysuit to be zipped up, which I duly did without questioning. He will appear again later, so keep reading!

The rest of our contingent arrived soon after myself, Linda gave a short brief and assigned buddy pairs. It took no time to kit up, no piece of kit had been left at the house and everything seemed to work, so we were ready in minutes. I took the decision not to wear an undersuit on this occasion, but settled for a rash vest instead. 

After buddy checks we made our way to the pier steps, stopping on the way to let the fishermen know our plan. Apparently they were more concerned about a solo diver who had gone in moments before, and not told them what he was doing, where he was going and had no surface marker buoy. Naughty. We slipped off the bottom of the steps and surface swam round pier under the fishers until we were clear of lines. I found if I swim on  my back a jet of water shoots down the back of my neck, and possibly through the armpits of my drysuit. I seems drier on my front with my arms tucked in. I reckon I could get away with a few more dives before thinking about having it repaired.

Visibility was about two or three meters initially, we saw a few wrasse and spider crabs to kick us off. At a depth of three meters and soon after I spied an edible crab, a dark shape loomed out of the silt and plankton carrying a high powered torch, illuminating all the interesting rocks and  seaweed below him. He signalled okay to us and disappeared, no buddy in sight. Andy and I exchanged glances - it was the diver who I met in car park, the one the fishers were annoyed about. Some people have no sense, even if it is only a shallow dive. We pushed on against the weak current and up to the swim-through where visibility dropped to near zero, as plankton had accumulated there over the past few weeks. The wall was like a ghostly dark shape and was the only datum that I had, I even had difficulty keeping Andy in my sights. Soon after clearing the swim-through visibility improved again and I spotted a (or 'the') cuttlefish, which help two tentacles up to me, so I reciprocated by giving him two fingers. It's probably a sort of cuttlefish gesture. 

Not much was spotted after that, I did note that the spider crabs were a lot bigger than I remember, some of them seemingly had bulging biceps! We turned round at about 130bar and swam back towards home. It was a lot nicer on the ankles as we were now swimming with the current. We saw more crabs and wrasse, and plenty more plankton. Then, out of the murk we came upon the other buddy team at an oblique angle, which lead to a brief moment of confusion and hilarity as buddy pairings got mixed. We left them to it and I followed Andy's direction to try find the end of the pier. At one point Andy stopped and searched among the seaweed, but found nothing (he later said he though he saw an octopus dashing for cover). We overshot the end of the pier and swam through the stringy seaweed for about fifteen minutes before surfacing right in the middle of the bay, almost in exactly the same place (and for the same reasons as) the dive with Steve G's last year!

Here's the log entry for this dive. No sketches I'm afraid, I got carried away with writing!