Following the club tradition of getting as far from Hemel as diesel allows, a boatload of divers from Dacorum Scuba headed down to the Lizard for four days of diving with Porthkerris Divers, out on one of their hard-boats the Celtic Kitten. With the Manacles 10 minutes off the beach and a house reef on the doorstep, it’s a hard place to beat for some tremendous diving, especially when the visibility and weather play nicely.
Most of the group arrived on the Thursday evening following a very hot drive down. Temperatures across the south having reached 35C, it was more than nicely balmy in Cornwall. We watched the thunder and lightning out at sea, interested to see how it might affect the next day. Thankfully it stayed away, and allowed those who were there to end the evening with a lovely BBQ provided by Gino.
Friday morning kicked off with a late start on the tides, dropping onto Vase Reef and drifting round onto Drawna Rocks — a pretty wall dive with plenty of gullies to potter through. Viz was a solid 6–8m and the water a genuinely pleasant 13°C on the bottom. In the afternoon we went back out to the Mohegan; the best-known wreck on the Manacles. This gave everyone a decent tour of boilers and structure (and lots of octopus) and most then came up the reef slowly back to the surface.
The evening was a walk over the coastal path or a drive for others to the Five Pilchards, with some excellent food and drink the next bay along.
Saturday morning we dived Penwyn. If you want close-ups of jewel anemones, this is the place! Every wall is festooned in them, every colour you can imagine, with kelp above 15m as usual and the possibility of cuttlefish encounters. The afternoon dive was the Volnay; a WWI cargo steamer that struck a mine in December 1917 and sank in 21m onto a sandy bottom in Porthallow Bay. She’s well broken up now under a fine layer of silt, but there’s still plenty to poke around: flat plates, wooden ammunition boxes, gorgonians on the ribs, white anemones, and a decent debris field to work through. A site to lookout for ball bearings (from ammunition) and a few of us saw crayfish and a big shoal of bib around the boiler.
In the evening for dinner Gino fired up the pizza oven and was throwing out some truly excellent pizza (or bread and salad if you asked nicely enough).
Sunday we changed things up and dived the Citrine wreck. We’d originally been aiming for the Ghent, but Citrine was closer in and a bit calmer off Lizard Point; you could see the lifeboat station from the deck. Easy diving was dropping to the wreck first, then coming up to nine metres for the rest of the dive. Structurally interesting with some octopus and a fair bit of seaweed. The afternoon was a drift outside Porthoustock/Coverack, heading north over rock bommies and sand at Lowland. Viz got a bit bitty at times but members spotted cat sharks, plentiful gorgonians & dead man’s fingers, beautiful shimmering shoals of sand eels and the obligatory octopus.
Dinner took us to Roskilly’s in the evening to sample their garlic ketchup and other local beers and ice-cream!
Monday we started with a slow drift on the River Fal out of Falmouth — technically a drift, though the current was slight-to-undetectable so it was hard to actually determine where to go at times. Unusually a drift with DSMBs deployed at the end, to stop them being used as slalom-course guides on the surface. Depth was only about 6m on the bottom, with a mixture of gravel and fine sand in patches, but life was there if you looked: hermit crabs, scallop, sand-eel shoals, catsharks and cuttlefish.
From there it was straight to the Hera, another truly beautiful wreck. Very kelp-covered (boat hand noted when he dives it in winter it’s fabulously absent) iron wreck on a maerl bed, so a bit of work poking under kelp fronds and into holes to find things, but the reward was worth it: octopus in the masts, crayfish under metal plate at the start, sand eels, and cuttlefish. Viz was a comfortable 10m and the maerl-and-structure combination made it a very pretty and different dive.
Six of us then rounded off the trip with the Porthkerris shore dive in the late afternoon on the last day before heading home. There had been a Fourth Element treasure hunt with some tokens remaining to win some lovely kit, so that was part of the incentive. Some of us ended up a bit lost on the way out, but that hardly matters on a reef this generous: octopus, cuttlefish, wrasse everywhere and blue lobster. No tokens found, sadly. Depths of 18–20m are on tap here within a 300m swim.
The final evening had us off to the Three Tuns for our last meal, reviewing the trip and pondering dives gone by!
All in all: eight or nine dives across four days for most, covering a good spread of wrecks and reefs from 6m to nearly 30m, new drysuits shaken down (with the customary weighting lessons learned along the way), and a proper chance to see lots of octopus, cuttlefish, crayfish and jewel anemones.
Thanks to the Porthkerris team and Celtic Kitten crew for looking after us, and to everyone who came along for diving, as well as organising dinners. But thanks especially to Kevin for organising another brilliant Cornwall trip.
