Friday 15th Sept Night dive on Dawlish Rock – report by Nik

The plan was a dark dive, so we arrived on a Friday evening after work and launched the boat at around half six. We had a quite lumpy sea (I’m advised that the technical term is “confused”), just enough to make you feel a little queasy when the boat was stationary, but it did make for a fun trip.

First divers – Dave, Derek and I – got in the water while it was still light, using a lobster pot marker as a shot. Whatever was in the pot probably felt seasick too, as it was on its end and bouncing up and down with the waves. Dawlish Rock is home to many and varied creatures: those spotted on this occasion included lobsters, bib, lobsters, conger eels, lobsters, a thornback ray, lobsters, various crabs, lobsters, and some prawns, which are kind of like miniscule transparent lobsters.

It’s a highly populated rock, but not all that big. I think we circumnavigated it four or five times in our 40 minutes – my plan was to spiral up it, but for some reason I kept ending up on the sea floor. There was a little current, which I had expected. The sky was still a fiery orange when we surfaced, and Phil and Chris kitted up in the near dark. This is something of a challenge when so much dive kit is black. The three of us nibbled fig rolls, drank tea and kept an eye on the bloom of light moving around the seabed, and it seemed hardly any time before Chris and Phil surfaced. They reported seeing much the same, but also a red mullet.

Return trip and boat recovery were fairly uneventful, even given the challenges of the boat’s sub-optimal steering on this occasion. It was the end of our Indian summer and the air was still a comfortable temperature. I think this is the best time of year to do a dark dive: even with having to take the boat back and wash her, I was in bed not long after midnight, and the sea is still a toasty 18 degrees.