You’ve Been Tangoed 2– The Sequel

(by Arnold Talats)

Trip preparations start the previous weekend, calculating and organizing the Nitrox fills for my three 12 litre cylinders and charging sets of batteries for the dive torches. The rest of the kit was checked and packed with the aid of my infamous comprehensive smackheads dive gear tick list on Thursday night ready for departure the following afternoon.  One o’clock arrived at work and I left with a big smile on my face, look out Weymouth, lock up your scallops, here we come! Malcolm turned up just before two o’clock and we loaded the car with practiced ease, final kisses and hugs for my wife and the two youngest daughters and we were away in less than ten minutes.

We head out towards junction 13 and hit stationary traffic just past the Interchange Retail Park; we discuss the merits of alternative routes and turn back into Kempston and on to Bromham village. We headed for Newport Pagnell and found stationary traffic at roadworks with a convoy system in operation. Sigh! After nearly an hour we were in Milton Keynes but the traffic was getting better the further we traveled from Bedford. We followed our usual route of Buckingham, Biscester, Oxford, Newbury, M3, and M27 and on to Weymouth with very little to slow us down.

Our B&B was located just over the hill past the Fire Station in Weymouth Marina. Although on the top floor and requiring side slung O2 ponies on the ascent, the room was extremely clean and comfortable with two full size adult single beds and the luxury of coffee making facilities and a colour TV!

I availed myself of a triple ‘S’ (shower, shampoo and a shave) in a bathroom that appeared to be larger than the entire caravan on my last dive trip! Resplendent in our best Club gear we headed off towards the harbour. A quick phone call on the way to check on how Kirsten, Kevin and Lisa were progressing and we head on into the Sailors Return by the swing bridge. It seemed a bit dark and gloomy and with no vegetarian food available for me we moved on to the Wetherspoons pub a short distance away, I think it was called the Gnats Chuff but I could be mistaken as it was getting dark. It was quite busy and noisy but the lager was cheap and plentiful as was the food.

Suitably refreshed we headed towards Tango until Tim Hunt called out to us as we pass the Anchor Inn on the waterfront. We head inside and find Inger at a table in the courtyard at the rear of the pub, it turns out that Friday night is Karaoke night and this is the furthest we can get ourselves away from the aural pleasure that is fast filling the pub. Kirsten, Lisa and Kevin arrive and so the hunt for hot food is on. As it is after nine o’clock the Anchor has stopped serving food by now and everywhere else we go we are met with shaking heads. On to backup plan two now, the Fish & Chip shop next to the swing bridge. While they are waiting for their food to be cooked to order Malcolm and I nip off to the Spar shop round the corner and purchase some tinnies of lager and real beer as Kirsten’s a bit of a hop head and we don’t want any trouble with the Police at this time of night. It’s back to the aft deck of the Tango and soak up a bit the harbour atmosphere whilst achieving a pleasant socially relaxed demeanor. Not quite Monaco but a lot better than the Boathouse in Bedford!

Pim and Pascale arrive and after exchanging greetings and comparing journeys we assist them in getting their gear on board. Malcolm and I bid everyone our goodnights and we head off for the high altitude boarding house. Fortunately for us we come across a ‘Real Ale’ pub in the back streets on the way that is reluctant to call last orders so a final nightcap is enjoyed sitting on plastic garden furniture in the street outside the pub. Next morning Malcolm informs me that he has nominated me as Captain for the English Olympic snoring team, I am not offended at all as I can’t hear it myself. We head downstairs to a full fried breakfast with a couple of Sea Legs Sea sickness tablets to follow. Malcolm drives down to the quayside in glorious sunshine and we load the dive gear onto Tango and meet up with the rest of our team for the weekend.

Phil Corben the skipper arrives and shortly after we head off out to sea with big eager smiles on our faces. The sea is possibly the smoothest I have seen it from the deck of Tango and we set course for the Binnendyk seven miles south east-ish from Weymouth. The Binnendyk is a 400ft Dutch steamship that hit a mine in October 1939. After about an hour we arrive and Phil sets the shot, Malcolm and I are the fourth pair in and the visibility is not quite crystal clear to say the least. The shot line is quite vertical to start with but starts to level out at about the 18metre mark and seems to go on and on horizontally for a very long time. I eventually arrive at the wreck, which is broken into large sections but is not a plate graveyard by a long way; the visibility varies between 3 and 8 metres. Large shoals of Bib swim all around us and we start to explore all the nooks and crannies. We find a lobster and a conger eel quite quickly and decide that both look a bit too mean for us to play with, I then come across a tyre on its side, which is roughly a metre in diameter but with a very rounded profile. It looks like it might be an aircraft tyre or even a gun carriage tyre. With the layer of silt fanned away the tread pattern is still sharp and clear after 64 years on the seabed, Wreck Detectives eat your hearts out! After further rummaging I find some copper windings for a small electric motor with loose wiring in the same area. The wreck has a very large population of Tom Pot Blennies and they appear to be the curators of the wreck, every time you look around there is one watching what you are doing. There are quite a few edible crabs hiding below sections of wreck and Spider crabs are easily found and picked up to show to Malcolm. Large numbers Pollack are gliding about us in shoals now and I discover a section of hull with some large rusty rivets in it. My gloves have Kevlar covered fingers and distracted for a moment I started rubbing the loose rust off a rivet, the surprising thing was that the rivet shined up as if it was new! It still had large corrosion dimples in it but it gleamed like polished metal. I tried this with a rivet on the St Dunstan the next day and it worked just the same, weird or what?

Air is now down to 100 bar on each cylinder so up, up and away to the surface under Malcolm’s self inflating SMB.We add a one minute safety stop at six metres and surface grinning from ear to ear and chattering like a couple of excited schoolboys. Using Nitrox34 we have had a 47minute dive to 27metres and we had 8 minutes bottom time left before we would incur any stops. Back on board and everything brown has hit the fan hard, the shoulder zip on my suit will not fully unzip, it jams about 150mm from the end and no matter how much I try I’m unable to get out of my suit! I recall hearing how other divers with jammed zips have had to be cut out of their suits and I am swallowing really quite hard by now. Malcolm is doing a very passable imitation of Dr Zip on call out and he finds a couple teeth on the outside of the zip are starting to come away from the backing and this is what is causing the jamming. We wait until we are in calm of Lulworth Cove and with the aid of a small screwdriver he aligns the loose teeth well enough for the zipper to pass carefully over them. Phew! After a close inspection of the teeth I reckon with great care, Dr Zip, a small screwdriver and a lot of luck I might be able to do some if not all of the planned dives.

We have a decent surface interval and a sandwich with Tango anchored in the centre of the cove, I exchange a nearly empty cylinder on the twin set for a full one containing Nitrox40. My new dive chum ‘Dr Zip’ manages to get my suit zip done up again so we finish off kitting up in the calm water and then head out due south to the Lulworth Banks. We are motoring out for what seems to be quite a while but then Phil blows the whistle and we all go in paired together in one wave with SMB’s already inflated. A good steady descent to the seabed and after some buoyancy adjustment we set off skimming the sand at a brisk pace. Visibility is a more than reasonable, 5 to 7metres! The seabed varies from rock to sand every 25metres or so, sometimes you come across geological fault line and the seabed will drop down a few meters, you have to very careful because the fault trench you have dropped down into will suddenly end with a 2 or 3metre vertical rock wall appearing suddenly in front of you with little or no warning. I find a Dogfish snoozing, which is about a metre long, and give it playful tweak on its tail, which sends it off at a fair lick; apparently they snooze in the day and hunt at night, at least until I come along.  Female Cuckoo wrasse are plentiful as are the small Queen scallops, the scallops are between 50 to 75millimeters across and swim up from the seabed when your shadow goes over them. The swimming motion is similar to jerky clockwork false teeth from a joke shop and in places on the Lulworth Banks you can have 30 or 40 small scallops swimming up and around hitting your body and mask. Over one section my shadow disturbs a baby cuttlefish only 50 millimeters long, it’s as curious as the adult version it stops long enough to give me the once over before changing colour and swimming off. I see lots of Hermit, Spider and Edible crabs, and a sponge with the name of Elephants hide. This looks a bit like melted grey cheese over rocks with a springy firm, texture; I also see Ross coral and resist the urge to touch the brittle petals this time unlike my last Weymouth weekend. 

Malcolm and I decided before we dived that we would try and collect a few large King scallops for some folks back in Bedford. It takes a little while to get your eye ‘in’ but after a while you start to notice a small puff of sand from the seabed in front of you as the scallop shuts itself, slide you fingers underneath it and lift gently, one very useful tip is not to put you fingers between the two open halves of the shell! It does hurt for quite a while, as the muscle used to close the shell is very powerful! The goody bag is filling up nicely, not quite up to Dave Bridges standard but still satisfyingly heavy. We set off for the surface with a one-minute safety stop and surface with a dive time of 41 minutes, a maximum depth of 22metres and 55 minutes bottom time remaining before we would incur stops. Another smooth pick up by Phil the skipper and we are heading back to Weymouth harbour.

At the dockside we slip easily into ‘Cylinder slave’ mode and load Kirsten and Pim’s car with 20 empty cylinders left for filling overnight at the Old Harbour Dive Centre.  Malcolm and I head off to the B&B on foot and spruce our selves up for the evening to come. We partake of a couple of ‘schnell’ pints on the stroll into town and meet the other ‘Weekenders’ in the Wellington pub a couple of streets in from the quayside. We have reserved the back room for our meal, which looks very much like someone’s small backyard with a lash up roof on it! Food is cheap and there is a lot of it, so we all tuck in with more dive talk flying about than we have in the Equipment Hold on a Tuesday evening.

The party breaks up after the meal with the diehard beer hounds heading into the Rendezvous pub by the swing bridge. In the main bar there is a hen party in full flow with a dozen or so ladies dressed up as Policewomen and one gentleman with a bare chest and tight trousers, he climbs onto the bar top, kneels provocatively and fills the front of his trousers with Anchor dairy whipped cream from a squirty can. He puts a straw downwards into his waistband and invites to Policewomen to have a taste. At this time we decide to take our drinks next door before his generous invitation is extended to our happy group. I ask our party why the bouncers on the door appear to have a bondage body harness just to hold a small radio to their chest and on the way out Kirsten politely asks one of the largest bouncers for the answer to my question.  At this I suggest we pick up the pace and we head off to the Sailors Return with Kirsten ‘I’m not frightened of anyone, Mongoose’ Lea under close escort. We all gather around a table for more talk and beer while Kirsten finds herself a new chum to talk diving to, I’m not sure but I think his personal gyroscope must be playing up judging by the way he is wobbling about. The landlady comes over and draws the curtains and turns off the outside lights and suddenly it dawns on me, we are in a lock in!

Common sense prevails so we leave for the B&B above the clouds picking up a bag of chips each to ease the walk back.  Sunday and we walk in glorious sunshine down to Tango with a spring in our step. Tim, Kirsten and I drive round to the Old Harbour Divers shop and while I am observing and signing for the Nitrox contents of our cylinders, Tim and Kirsten have already loaded the rest in the car. It’s all about timing you see, we manage to get all 20 cylinders and the 3 of us in as well! Very nice dive car Tim, lot of room for kit, I make a mental note to make sure Tim is made aware of all future Tango bookings. We form a cylinder chain back at the boat and we are all working so well as a team that loading takes only a couple of minutes if that.  Phil takes us slowly out of a very flat harbour onto an equally flat sea with blue skies and smiles all round.

It a long trip round Portland Bill to Lyme Bay but we relax and enjoy the scenery steadily slipping past. There are a lot of cameras out on the boat and there were a lot of snaps taken of Portland Bill lighthouse, must be the unusual shape I suppose. Tim has a large set of binoculars and gives the appearance of being on U Boat watch for quite some time; he eventually gives up when he can’t spot one.  With the weather and the sea, it looks like we are in promotional video for diving from Weymouth; it really couldn’t get much better than this. Blue Turtle, a dive boat from Lyme Regis has already shotted the wreck before we got here so we get permission to use his shot.
We all kit up but as Pascale puts on one of her fins the strap snaps, luckily I carry a spare assembled strap and she is ready to dive in a couple of minutes. The St Dunstan is a 200ft long bucket dredger that hit a mine in 1917 on minesweeping duty. It still looks quite intact as we descend and it appears to be rush hour in the fish world with shoals in all directions. There are quite a few diver pairs on the wreck swimming past us every couple few minutes, Pim and Pascale also swim past with excited ‘OK’ signs exchanged between us.

The sides of the wreck have glorious carpets of pink and green jewel anemones, and if you get up close with a torch all the delicate features and colours come into their own. I’m a bit of a sucker for these babies if you haven’t guessed by now. We fin slowly along port side and I see a Thick Lipped mullet rummaging about the seabed for food with a couple of good size Gurnards for company. I try my rusty rivet-rubbing trick at this point and achieve the same shiny result!  Looking into the holes in the hull we see large shoals of Bib and Pollack with Spider crabs lurking and trying not to look too obvious. I find another Conger that should only exist in bad dreams and Malcolm points out it has very brave Shrimps for chums climbing on and around it! We manage to complete two slow circuits of the wreck with lobsters and crabs added to our ‘seen’ list. There is also a pair of divers below us with a camera in a large cloud of silt so thick that only their moving fins and the camera flash can be seen, this goes off every few seconds. I can only assume that either the button is stuck on the camera or they are winning finalists in ‘Backscatter 2003’. We slowly ascend up the shot line in a very relaxed frame of mind and a safety stop at 6metres with my mask filling up because I am smiling so much. Using Nitrox34 we had a 46minute dive to 29metres with 3minutes bottom time remaining before incurring stops. Back on Tango and we head back towards Portland with a nice mug of tea.

We start to kit up with a fresh cylinder of Nitrox40 a short distance away from the cliffs on the westerly side of Portland. We are above the wreck of the wreck of the Gertrude which ran aground here in 1894 and the wreck of the James Fennel which came to grief in 1920 in the same area but slightly deeper at 15metres. Malcolm and I are first off and drop onto a very large piece of horizontal hull at 15metres, we appear to be bang in the middle of a wreck debris field with some suspended particles but the visibility is 6 to 8metres so long as you don’t go back on yourself. The area has large 2 to 5metre diameter boulders over a fairly flat seabed and I think these must all come from the cliffs above over a long period of time. We find a ships boiler but I have absolutely no idea which wreck it belongs to. We end up conducting almost a fingertip search around and under boulders, I am distracted by the sight of an edible crab for a moment and lose contact with Malcolm, I am about to surface when Malcolm reappears out of the gloom looking for me, we proceed with a lot more caution from this point. Looking at the seabed I see some gray clay patches a metre or so wide with lots of boreholes in them between boulders, it looks like some has been repeatedly pushing a round pencil in during a very long moment of boredom. I try to see what is in there but the holes go too deep to see. There are juvenile fish to be seen shoaling close to rocks but very little of any reasonable size, a couple of small lobsters are spotted lurking under rocks as well as a small squat lobster. We exchanged our personal signal for ‘I’m bored now, lets do something else’ which is a hand covering and patting the regulator in the mouth as if we were stifling a yawn. So after a flurry of hand signals we set of on a drift under Malcolm’s SMB to finish off the dive, this can be a little awkward over a boulder field but it does add an element of excitement to swoop up over the boulders and down the other side. We are not talking large depth differences here but enough to get you whooping into your mouthpiece.

As I came level with the top of very large boulder I see a pipefish on some weed, it was 400mm long and a pale orangey yellow in colour. I was passing directly over it so I made a lunge and picked it up! I think it must have been snoozing but handling it very carefully I examined it and passed it to Malcolm.  It was rigid like a ruler in your hand but once Malcolm let it go it swam off very quickly none the worse for wear. Good steady ascent with the safety stop of one minute at 6metres and back onto Tango for one of the legendary Kevin Hopton speed de-kits. You just manage to sit down and Kevin has got all your BC clips undone, suit inflator disconnected and your fins off before the reg comes out of your mouth! Thanks Kevin. On this dive we were using Nitrox40 and we had a 48minute dive to 19metres with 76minutes bottom time remaining before incurring stops. A cruise in the sun back to Weymouth and the kit almost flies off Tango to the quayside. We have to wait for the harbour swing bridge to shut before Malcolm can collect his car from the B&B, but we are loaded very quickly all the same.

Goodbyes and handshakes all round and we set off retracing the same route we came down on. Three and a half hours door to door, my kit is put in the garage damp to be rinsed on Monday evening as it’s now 10.30 and I’ve still got to relate the whole wonderful weekend to my non diving wife. The efforts of Dr Zip and everyone else on this weekend have made it one of the most enjoyable on Tango so far. When’s the next one?