Camping & Diving- an excellent few days in Porthkerris Part 1 June 26, 2007
Posted by Mark Gilmour in : Dive Reports, UK diving , trackback
Ever since I started diving in 2004 I have been coming to Porthkerris on YD trips. This was my fifth visit and Lisa’s fourth, even the children have been three times.
The weather forecast had not been kind, a week of heavy rain and winds meant that the diving and camping was going to be very difficult if not neigh on impossible. Others of the group of 24 divers that would be coming down for the weekend had been camping for three days already when we arrived on Thursday. They had not yet got a dive in or really dried out from the rain. As the wind pulled at the tent and the rain fell heavily on Thursday lunchtime as Scott and I battled to get the tent up I wasn’t sure that we would be successful. Then one after another three tent poles splintered in the force of the wind. Now I really was doubtful that we could do this. Scott held on to the tent with all the strength that a little seven year old could muster and somehow we managed to get the poles in position and the tent fairly stable. At this point Simon and Gary arrived still dressed in their drysuits having just got back in from their first dive of the week. They helped us move the tent into a more suitable and safer position and we succeeded in securing it down. The weather cleared a little and we finished it off. Meanwhile the two older girls Elizabeth and Emily had been entertaining Heather in the car. They did a good job as it took us over three hours to get the tent in place. This was worse than two years ago when it took 6 of us to get a similar tent up.
Once the tent was up Scott and I changed out of our sopping wet clothes and we headed off to Penzance to pick up Lisa from the train station. She had had to stay at home for an extra few days as she had rehearsals for her play Dancing at Lughnasa in which she is starring this week (25th June) in the Plaza in Romsey.
During the night of Thursday the wind and the rain continued, lashing down on the tent, but it withstood and come the morning the sun was breaking through the clouds and the wind had dropped off almost completely. Perhaps this was going to be a great weekend.
Today Lisa and I were going to take it in turns diving, she went out on the midday rib dive with Gary, Kathy & Simon, although Simon didn’t quite make it due to lack of mask. (it turned up a few hours later in the pump house), then I went out on the 2pm dive. So Lisa ended up in a three with Gary and Kathy on Vase rock whilst Joe and I went out to the Mohegan and Raglans Reef.
Dive 1 Mohegan/Raglans. Dive time 43mins, Max Depth 24m. Vis approx 6-8m Back in a single 12 and a BCD and how easy it was to lift and get kitted up even on the rib. We dropped straight into the boiler area of the mohegan and drifted gently over the plates. The vis and ambient light meant that torches weren’t neccessary, I only turned mine on once to seek a peek underneath a large plate that provided a decent access to go underneath the wreck and have a good look around. Unfortunately Joe had gone ahead somewhat and was on the edge of visibility so I left that for another time. Also being on a single 12 I was somewhat retisent to squeeze my way in without any real redundancy. So we carried on, after just 8 or so minutes we were off the mohegan and heading over Raglan reef, we cut west a little too early and ended up in the kelp at about 12m. But still had the opportunity to see a fair number of the brightly coloured jewel anemones that were opened up to the current that was bristling past providing them with the nutrients they required. After about 10 minutes or so in the kelp, we decided to call it a day and began our ascent atr 37 minutes. A thoroughly enjoyable first dive down in Porthkerris for a while.
After getting back to the shore at Porthkerris beach I walked back to the tent to catch up with the rest of the family. After dropping the tank off for a fill, I was beckoned back to the rib, the shout came from Gary and Simon, are you coming on this dive then? They were off scalloping, seemed too good an opportunity to miss, so I quickly assembled the kit again, thankfully Lisa had got her cylinder filled from earlier and ran back down to the rib and off we went.
Dive 2 Helford River When we did this dive last year, we encountered three basking sharks on the way, this wasn’ t to be the case this year, but after 68 minutes Simon and I came back to two decent sized goody bags of scallops ready for the BBQ that evening. Turned out we had enough for both nights, so after going through and sizing them making sure that we were being responsible in our scalloping, we placed a goody bag on the anchor bouy of the rib and left them in the water ready for Saturday. We then swam in from the rib onto the shore with our other bag ready for the Friday night BBQ.
more to come…… still got Saturday’s dives to write up
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