After a good four weeks of training with Sentinel MOD1, HSE Scuba and then TekCamp I spent a weekend exploring some of the diving of the south coast in England. I went to Portland and Scimitar Diving to see some of the wrecks and life there. Seeing how it’s an island nation that has been involved in several wars and on top of that can have some rough seas there is no shortage of wrecks. Me being more of a biology nerd was intrigued by the wreck centered diving down here.

There is a lot of history to the diving here and I learned that that the same wharf we set out from was used when loading the landing craft used for the D-day landing. We definitely had a more relaxed mood when loading the boat in the morning for a day of diving than the soldiers had preparing to invade France.

My first dive was a scalloping dive made drifting along the banks outside Portland. With a substantial tide going in and out every day there can be quite a lot of current, so all we had to do was drop down, find a good position and then just go with the flow of the water. The rest of the divers on the boat collected literally hundreds of scallops while I collected photographs. Much of the fauna I recognized from Sweden but there were some new acquaintances as well. We then did a wreck dive on the Elene R, a victim of the second world war. The crew described the conditions as a little bit swelly, which means me and my twinset were being thrown around the deck, fighting to get my fins on. Once in the water though there were no problems, we were dropped right by the shotline and descended down to the wreck. Here there was a overload of things to look at, not only was there a wreck, but it also had inhabitants, primarily lots of little blennies and quite a few big scary conger eels.

I was truly impressed by the visibility out here and it stayed good the next day when we did a dive at a large wreck called the Aeolian Sky. The boat went down in 1979 after a collision and after a failed attempt to tug her in to the harbor she went down in 30 meters of water, resting on her side. Coming down the shotline and having a visibility of 15 meters or more it made for a stunning dive and all the local divers agreed that they had never seen it as good as this.

The sad thing is that just when conditions are getting really good diving will most likely be stopped for a while. As I was there the whole town was in a state of readiness for the Olympics sailing competition that will be held down there. But the wrecks will still be there after the Olympics is over and Scimitar Diving will be there to help you get out there and enjoy them.