One for the logbook

Written by staff reporter Tuesday, 10 August 2010 00:00

Alex Mustard Sarah Conner Clare Peddie Mike Pitts Jane Morgan onty Halls Sue Scott, Martin Parker, John Nightingale

CANADA CAN
Alex Mustard, underwater photographer and DIVE columnist

Browning Pass is between a cluster of islands off the north of Vancouver Island, Canada, accessible from Port Hardy. The tide pumps water between two islands and there are about four dive sites there. Above 10m is a forest of bull kelp, then colourful reefs below. There’s the most amazing diversity of life – every surface is plastered with crabs and nudibranchs and there are weird and unusual fish as well as sea lions. For a British diver, in particular, it feels exotic; it’s the Pacific so although there are some similarities to the best of British diving, there are many different creatures.

Normally you can’t rely on good weather, but when I dived there in September this year, and we had a week of sun and every dive was phenomenal. We were coming up from the reef into cathedral-like light and this golden kelp. My buddies and I were staying in the water until we’d got every last drop of air out of our tanks.

ICE IS NICE
Sarah Conner, BSAC north Scotland regional coach

This February, I taught on the first ice-diving course BSAC had run in the UK. I’ve been ice diving in Norway and Austria before, but it’s amazing to do such a thing in the UK, and only 40 minutes from my home. You can go to a reasonable dive site and if there’s ice over the top, it becomes magical.

Throughout the Scottish ski season, from November to April, you’re likely to find somewhere you can ice dive. We held the course at Powmill Quarry in Fife. There are no facilities at the quarry, and it’s quite a long hike from the car park. On this day, the path had become a frozen stream and was covered in snow.

The students were experienced divers and instructors for whom diving had become a bit easy – this was their new challenge. It was giving something to people who’ve given so much to their BSAC branches as instructors.

I spent five hours under the ice and the students joined me one by one. Another instructor was on the shore. We spent most of the dive just beneath the ice, getting people to turn upside down and ‘walk’ on the underside of the ice, and playing with the air bubbles that get trapped there.

Diving under ice is a very different diving experience. You can look up through the ice and see people topside, and those on the surface can see the divers.

WAKATOBI WATCHING
Clare Peddie, BSAC chair

I had a hip replacement in July, so 2009 hasn’t been the best year of diving for me. However, I did manage, with a little help from my friends, to lead the annual University of St Andrews marine biology field trip – I’m a principal teaching fellow in biology at the university.

Every year, I take a group of between ten and 15 students to Hoga Island in Wakatobi Marine Park, southeast Sulawesi, for two weeks. In the first week, they learn underwater survey techniques, and then the second week is spent conducting a scientific project. We dive three times a day.

The diversity of marine life in Wakatobi is absolutely exceptional, the visibility at that time of year is outstanding and the weather superb. My best dive this year was definitely at a site called Coral Garden, which is a bowl of coral that spills over into a vertical wall. The site is subject to swirling tides and a diversity of fish so dense that you often can’t see the coral for fish! I’m a bit of a nudibranch fiend and we found this beauty – Flabellina exoptata. I normally video during dives, but this time I had a still camera – lucky me!

BARRELS OF FUN
Mike Pitts, underwater cameraman

I was diving near Speyside, Tobago, with a group of American divers and photographers. It’s not classic Caribbean reefs in that area – it’s where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Caribbean Sea and the waters mix. It’s a very dramatic marinescape with the most remarkable barrel sponges I’ve seen, and a photographer’s dream.

We were drift diving on the last dive of the day, and I was hoping to get some great photos. I’d taken some shots of a French angel early on in the dive that I was very happy with – they’re one of my favourite photographic subjects as they’re so slow moving! Then we saw a massive green moray, but I couldn’t get close to it – another diver had got in first. I was taken away by the current, despondent because I hadn’t got the shot, when I saw a second, bigger eel. He must have been seven or eight feet long. Finning desperately against the current to hold my place, I waited, knowing the other diver would be following me and a diver would really make the picture. It turned out perfectly – he knew exactly the shot I was going for and was an excellent model!

SHARK ATTRACTION
Jane Morgan, underwater photographer and DIVE online editor

I was at about 18m, on top of a pinnacle of rock, desperately pretending to be a bit of coral as three tiger sharks came at me from different angles – it was certainly my most memorable dive of the year. I was on a liveaboard in the Bahamas run by Jim Abernethy, and the goal was to dive with sharks, in particular tiger sharks, which I’ve always wanted to see. We’d been diving with lemon and Caribbean reef sharks for a day or so and while the other divers were having lunch, Simon Rogerson (DIVE’s editor) and I decided to hop in the water. Jim and I got in first, and descended to this pinnacle. He was shaking the bait box, and it was attracting more sharks than I’d ever seen in my life – they were flying over my head.

We’d been told on the boat to keep an eye on the tiger sharks in particular, and keep our camera between us and them. But suddenly, there were three coming at me. I didn’t know which way to face. Fortunately, Jim distracted them and Simon joined us – a great relief, as I was no longer the only subject for attention. ‘I’d been to shark feeds before but never been in the midst of the action – it was a baptism by fire. But I’d do it again tomorrow.

DANCING PARTNER
Monty Halls, BBC TV presenter and DIVE columnist

I spent a week on a liveaboard in the Maldives, with my buddy – an ex-ballet dancer – who had always wanted to see a manta ray. It was her lifelong dream. There was a good chance we would see mantas at some point in the week, but we weren’t expecting to see one when we started a dive to the north of South Male atoll.

Not long into the dive, a manta suddenly appeared, right above my buddy’s head. It swept down in front of her, and she followed it down and they both twirled around, as if they were dancing with each other. I asked her afterwards if she was aware that it looked like they were dancing, and she said it was her natural reaction.

It’s always exciting to see a manta ray – a heart-stopping moment – but to watch someone else have an encounter like that gives you a great vicarious pleasure. That moment made it my dive of the year.

Of course, I didn’t have a camera with me – that would’ve made it the dive of the century!

GRASS ROUTES
Sue Scott, marine biologist and DIVE columnist

My husband and I work as lecturers on cruise ships, which are usually in port for less than a day, but sometimes it’s enough to grab a quick dive. I’d read a couple of articles about diving in Croatia, and its relatively unexplored and unspoiled nature appealed. Veljko and Nada Rusnov, a Croatian couple who run a dive operation about 45 minutes’ drive northwest of Split, really looked after us for one day in May.

We dived just a few minutes by boat from their house, situated in a tiny bay lined with picturesque red-roofed houses. The underwater scenery varied from deep drop-offs and caves with beautiful sea fans, sponges and other colourful invertebrates, to shallow seagrass beds, where little green wrasse advertised for mates above their sandy nests.

Biologists like getting to know the small creatures, so this was heaven for me. Veljko found anglerfish, crayfish and octopus, and showed me ancient amphoras lying on the sea bed. He apologised for the ‘poor’ visibility, saying it was much better later in the year, but I enjoy diving in plankton, seeing the sea at the most productive time rather than the clearest.

After our dives, Nada cooked us a delicious lunch of grilled fresh fish, washed down with local wine. A totally idyllic day – I could imagine staying longer, having a relaxed holiday with easy diving, exploring further and getting to know the critters in the bay. We’ll be back!’

MOLLER’S RIGHT
Martin Parker, Ambient Pressure Diving

I don’t get to dive anywhere near enough – I’m lucky if I do 20 dives in a year. Opportunities are few and far between, so I tend to be quite choosy about where I go. Every time I went to the Boat Show, German diving journalists would tell me how I had to go and dive the Rosalie Moller in the Red Sea – they found the wreck in the 1990s. This year, on holiday in Egypt, I got the chance to go.

I was having dinner with Orca Dive Club and they said they would be diving the Rosalie Moller the first chance they got, depending on the weather. We went to dive it the next day. Most people build up to a dive on that wreck, but it was my first dive of the holiday – I’d just been sunbathing before!

It’s a superb wreck, especially on a rebreather. It’s 45m deep and full of fish life. We had an hour on the wreck, with very little deco to do; others on open circuit only got 20 minutes to explore. The wreck is upright and intact, and although the visibility isn’t great compared to much of the Red Sea, that doesn’t detract from it.’

LIFE ON WRECK
John Nightingale, environmental columnist

I’m not really a wreck diver. I’ve dived a lot of wrecks in the UK and abroad, but I’m down there to see the marine life. However, the wrecks around Coron Island at the northern tip of Palawan in the Philippines, are very atmospheric.

From my base on Sangat Island, I was a 20-minute boat trip from ten huge Japanese wrecks. My favourite was the Irako, which I dived again and again.

It was a refrigerated provisions ship for the Japanese army during the Second World War and was bombed by the Americans in 1944. It’s huge – about 150m long and 20m wide and stands upright on the sea bed at 42m.

What I love about it is that there’s so much there – very little has been salvaged. The wheel is still in the wheelhouse, huge swivel mounts for the anti-aircraft guns are on deck, and there are coils of ropes. You can go right down inside the wreck, deep into the bowels of the ship, through long corridors and into the cargo hold and the engine room. In the kitchens there are saucepans on the floor and the workshop still has tools in it.

A vast school of jacks gathered around a mast, and on one occasion, when I was deep down inside the ship, I looked out a porthole and saw them all streaming past. They were just inches from me – it was wonderful. ■