My 100th dive Basking in the Sun…….. May 15, 2006
Posted by Mark Gilmour in : Dive Reports, General, UK diving , trackbackThey are back…… we were out on a rib down at Porthkerris in Falmouth bay off the Lizard in Cornwall this weekend when Andy the skipper spotted the dorsal fin of a basking Shark. He cut the engines immediately and we drifted to a halt. We then saw another fin coming breaking the water and so there were two. One was extremely inquisitive and made a pass of the rib. His mouth was wide open and we were treated to the characteristic image of the shark feeding. He looked to be about 4m in length so probably a juvenile. Finbar was straight in the water putting his mask on as he slipped off the tube of the rib. Sitting in the water he had a couple of really close encounters as they swam alongside him. It was all too tempting and so we all went in. We all waited patiently in the water as they swam around us at a distance. Simon got another shot when he was dropped a bit further up tide of the sharks and drifted along past them as we were all picked up. And all this was before we had begun our dive.
This was to be my 100th Dive, Lisa and I were down in Porthkerris for the weekend it what was becoming a bit of an annual YD event. We arrived early on Friday morning after dropping the children off at my parents in Brixham. After setting up the tent we got kitted up and headed off for a shore dive on Drawna reef. A fantastic dive, heading around the initial reef just off the shore. This was Lisa’ first time in her new drysuit and weezle undersuit so we had to see if she had got the weighting right. She was a little light by the end so we added another couple of kilos for the afternoon. So that was dive 99 for me max depth 12m, avg 7.5m. lots of life, a couple of good pics,… just don’t ask Simon to navigate past the dead end gully!!
And then after a short surface interval we were out on the rib to do a scallop dive to get some food for our evening BBQ and this where we saw the Basking Sharks on our way out. After the excitement of the sharks we headed up the river a little and dropped in to drift along the bottom picking up scallops as we went. Lisa is quite the hunter!!! But we came up with a reasonable sized goody bag which would suffice for our dinner. Once back on the rib, Andy our skipper emptied all the goody bags one at a time to size the scallops, anything too small went back into the water. Only one or two needed to go back from our bag which meant responsible fishing from us. Even found an oyster aswell.
So that was my 100th dive. Basking Sharks, scallops, and diving with my wife…. a truly great dive. I had wanted it to be something special and it really did turn out to be such.
That evening we got the BBQ going and made up scallop, pepper and red onion….. ummmm
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