Pirate Bear
- Pirate Bear's trip Dive Time 2014
Cracking dive on this submarine with Nessa. The wreck was very much as I remembered it albeit being much darker and worse viz than last year. We arrived on the wreck on the port side around the conning tower. Had a good look around the base on the conning tower before making our way down to seabed level. There were lots of bib swimming around under the wreck and some absolutely enormous pollack. Working our way around the bow we saw Tony and Scott. In the gloom it was a lot harder to make out the lovely pointy bow but the torpedo tubes were still very obvious with a massive conger poking his head out of the lower starboard torpedo tube..... needless to say Nessa screamed when she saw him. Working our way backwards towards the stern we came across a number of other holes to look inside- some with congers some without. Back towards the stern we saw the prominent hydroplanes and another huge conger eel sheltering in an area just above where the propellor would have sat. At this point we were quickly clocking up deco time so we moved onto the top of the wreck and progressed towards the conning tower, where we did a circuit whilst putting up the DSMB. Funny to see the prominent structure of the conning tower (as per the photos of the Sidon whilst she was still in a floating state). Great dive followed by a nice pepper soup and roll. Nice boat to dive on and lovely facilities over at the Portland Marina- fit for an Olympian ;-) Breathing 80% on the deco dive brought my deco time down from 12 mins to 6.... very nice! Need to get Nessa qualified on her ADP soon so she can catch up too.
Bit of a bizarre dive with Ivan on this man made art installation. Concrete wreck that has been made and sunk. Went around the wreck kissing all the cameras that have been installed and doing a scary face with my torch beam!! Everyone joined us on the wreck, the viz was totally destroyed (although Ivan and I were not entirely blameless there) so we made our way off onto a bit of drift dive. Although the viz was pretty poor (like diving out of Eastbourne) there was still quite a bit to see. There were lots of gunnards, hermit crabs of various, some Leech's spider crabs, a massive edible crab and some normal spider crabs. One thing I saw a few of but have never seen before were lots of red starfish with webbed tentacles. They looks like simply a pentagon shape- pretty strange but quite cool.
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