Simon, Jane, James, Paul and Sara traveled to the Dorset coast for some nearly wild camping and diving. Camping at the Chesil Equestrian Centre which was only a 9 minute drive to Chesil Beach. If we were lucky we’d get a parking spot close to beach.

• Divers: Paul, James
• Max Depth: 17.9
• Dive Time: 62
• Water temperature: 16 degrees C
• Viz: 4-5 metres
• Dive Details: The first dive of the trip was at Chesil Cove. Entry down the pebble beach was easy compared to the recent Weybourne walks and the visibility looked good through the wavelets. We descended into about 6 m of water and swam out, heading offshore over the sandy patches spotting red mullet, shoals of sand eels, some big ballan wrasse and lots of pollack and bib on the way. Continuing the swim out past the massive seaweed covered boulders, we reached the deeper reef, about 17 m depth, and were greeted by several tom pot blennies hiding in plain sight on the sediment in between the red algae encrusted boulders. There were lots of yellow ‘boring’ sponges on the boulders and the occasional spider crab too. I tried a few times to get some footage of the retracting fan worms but they almost always disappeared as I was setting up the macro lens! I did manage to take a short bit of footage of the pink striped flatworm before we started the swim back in. We spotted a couple of friendly snake pipefish amongst the algae on the return journey before I sent up my DSMB and we ascended from 13m. The surface swim back to shore was aided by the slight onshore wind… a foreboding sign of things to come!

• Divers: Simon, Jane
• Max Depth: 17.7 metres
• Dive Time: 62
• Water temperature: 15 degrees C
• Viz: 4-5 metres
• Dive Details: