Peter Glanville takes a trip down memory lane to consider the changing face of South Coast diving and of his beloved Devonian wreck were the coast local to us. They often dived mid-week evenings at Lyme Regis and on my father’ s half-day we would drive down to Lyme, where a local fishermen would take us out to the wreck of the Baygitano.
UKDIVING
A healthy fan coral on the wreck from 2001
Half a century on the Baygitano
Peter Glanville takes a trip down memory lane to consider the changing face of South Coast diving and of his beloved Devonian wreck were the coast local to us. They often dived mid-week evenings at Lyme Regis and on my father’ s half-day we would drive down to Lyme, where a local fishermen would take us out to the wreck of the Baygitano.
Lying in about 20m of water a mile out from the famous Lyme Cobb, it had been known for years to anglers and was an obvious target for the( then) new sport of scuba diving. In those early days, the club rarely paid for the privilege of diving the wreck. It was covered in lost anchors, and a few were brought up each dive and given to the skipper as recompense.
I
was 17 when I first dived‘ The Wreck’, as it was known locally. I learned to dive aged 14 with the late Captain Trevor Hampton, at the British Underwater Centre in Dartmouth, having been given the opportunity by my father who had trained there in 1957. He went on to train as a Master Diver, using an oxygen rebreather and hard hat. It was 1968 – half a century after the torpedoing, by a German U boat, of the Baygitano off Lyme Regis. I never dreamed that I would be diving the same wreck a century after it had sunk.
We lived half an hour’ s drive from Lyme Regis, slap in the centre of the Jurassic Coast. My father, a local GP, joined the recently formed branch of Taunton Sub Aqua club( No10) whose stamping grounds
A fan coral from 1996 – was it the same one? 37