Dan's Adventure

When most people think about scuba diving they picture crystal clear water, hot sun, exotic locations and colourful fish. Until March that was what I thought of too, but then I decided that I would like to dive most weekends and unfortunately I don’t have the time or the money to fly off to some far flung place for a weekend, so I started looking towards diving closer to home. For the last year I’ve been living in London, so I thought I should investigate the cold, dark, murky world of UK diving.

So in mid March I found myself jumping in to a lake just outside of London. The water was a chilling 5 degrees celsius and there was at most, 1 metre of visibility. I was however doing a course to learn how to dive in a dry suit, so it was actually warmer in the water than it was out of it. That came as a big surprise to me. With a dry suit you have seals at the neck and wrists to keep the water out, so instead of a thin layer of water keeping you warm like in a wet suit, in a dry suit you have a layer of air that is kept inside. The air and a thick set of thermals kept me very warm indeed.

Discovering that UK diving wasn’t going to be as cold as I had anticipated was a real turning point for me. Although I didn’t see anything of note in the muddy puddle, I started to look forward to diving in the sea and seeing some of the many wrecks dotted around the coast. I ordered myself a dry suit and started planning weekends away.

Over the last few months I have dived at various sites along the South West coast including Plymouth and Falmouth, and last weekend I went on the best UK trip that I have been on to date to Lundy. Lundy was England’s first marine nature reserve and marine conservation zone and is the biggest island in the Bristol channel, lying around 12 miles off the north coast of Devon. The main draw of Lundy is the diversity of the marine life and the seal population.

Usually when I am told that we’re going to see something on a particular dive, I don’t get my hopes up, whether thats sharks, turtles, rays or whatever else, but on this occassion I should have believed the hype. We were surrounded by seals! The skipper told us to go down and just wait on the seals approaching us, so thats exactly what we did and within minutes we had seals all aound us. They chewed our fins, brushed against us, stared at us and mimicked our bubble blowing. At one point I felt a tug on both my fins and turned around to see a seal hugging one fin whilst another chewed the other. I wish I had taken my camera!

The other thing that made the Lundy trip so good was the visibility. On most of the dives it was around 10 metres. So not only was I nice and warm in my dry suit, but I was enjoying seeing lots of marine life in relatively clear water. I even got a little sun burnt! I’m going back to Lundy in a few weeks time and will definitely be taking my camera, so expect lots of seal photos after that trip.

The video was produced by Big Squid dive centre who are based in Clapham, London.

Photo credit: Andrew Bundy