CLUBFOCUS
Fish and lobster on the Baygitano
Pink fan coral on the Saw Tooth Ledges
What sea life do you see?
We have an abundance of fish along the Jurassic Coast, especially on our wrecks where you will be greeted by live, moving curtains, before you see any wreckage. We see thousands of bib, shoals of pollock and whiting, and plenty of wrasse when diving on, for example, the Baygitano off Lyme Regis and the British Inventor on Lulworth Banks. That one is nicknamed‘ The Scallop Wreck’ by local divers, for obvious reasons.
Bat’ s Head Reef, a dive site only discovered by our Diving Officer in 2020, has parallel deep-vee ledges where an underwater nursery has established. At other scenic
sites such as Pulpit Rock and the Ariels, we are seeing the return of the crayfish, which was almost hunted to extinction in the late 1960s and 1970s. Pink fan coral and a wide range of nudibranchs can be found, even on well-dived local harbour wrecks such as the Countess of Erne.
What about the shipwrecks?
It is estimated that 1,000 or more shipwrecks have taken place in these waters since the Elizabethan period. Our Diving Officer is a licensee for four historic protected wreck sites off the Dorset coast: HMT Arfon at 43m; HMS A3 Submarine, 39m;
Chesil Beach Cannon Site, 10-15m; and West Bay Cannon Site, 12m. In September 2023, on a Wednesday evening club dive we were lucky to see the West Bay site. The depth here is just 12m, where our divers located the three cannons, one bronze and the two large admiralty anchors that lie on and around the site. We are running a club trip on 5 September this year and David is happy to run similar charter trips when Waverider is running out of West Bay( see the centre’ s dive calendar JurassicAquaSports. co. uk). The Arfon and A3 sites are deep dives, which we haven’ t dived as a club.
Limpets on kelp
Crystal jelly, West Bay
Crab on the Adelaide, Chesil Beach
Anglerfish at Bat’ s Head Reef
Nudi, Countess of Erne
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