A Long Weekend in Plymouth, Persier and Fairylands
By Mark Milburn on 4 September 2008
Europes Diving Capital?
Devonians like to claim that Plymouth is the diving capital of Europe. I am sure that a lot of people would agree and maybe more would disagree. There are certainly a lot of diving centres and boats operating out of Plymouth.
Europes first artificial reef, The Scylla, was sunk out of Plymouth. The funniest thing is they sunk it off Cornwall! It was scuttled within 400m of the most dived salt water wreck in the U.K, the WWII liberty ship, the James Egan Layne, still in Cornwall. The combined site is now probably the busiest piece of water around the British coastline.
I had decided to cross the border from Cornwall into England for a long weekend’s diving in Plymouth.
The S.S. Persier
We arrived at the quay early; ropes were off at 9am to catch the slack water. Our first destination was going to be the S.S. Persier, a WWII Belgian steamship sunk by a torpedo in 1945. It is located in Devonian waters, at a depth of around 30m. I had looked at the list of names and recognised a couple of rebreather divers on the list, so I had organised my twinsets to be full of Nitrox, to give me a chance of a long dive rather than a long sit on the boat waiting for their return. We arrived at the site just after 10:30 and entered the water soon after. There was one other diveboat already on the site when we arrived, so we used their shotline. Descending slowly, it was obvious that the plankton had started to arrive. It wasn’t long before it was quite dark and everyone’s torches were turned on, the light only managing to penetrate between four and five metres. Reaching the bottom close to the bows I kept the plates on my left, and headed towards the stern. As I passed along the wreckage there was a light covering of dead man’s fingers and sea fans on the flattened plates and bent metal.
The 5800 ton vessel was carrying emergency supplies for the newly liberated Belgians. The cargo has long since gone, but the wreck still has a lot to show, even though it is well collapsed onto its port side. There are lots of places for the shoals of bib and the odd wrasse to hide. Various parts of the cargo and deck handling machinery lie strewn across the sand where we spotted several dogfish. The boilers are standing very proud of the wreckage; the fire boxes are nearly at the top showing that they have rolled over after it had sunk. Looking around the top of the boilers I couldn’t miss the hundreds of small nudibranchs that were covering them. Obviously a new batch of young.
Time was now getting short. I had spent 45 minutes at around 29m and it was time to finish the dive. I didn’t fancy too much time decompressing in 8 degrees of water. I reached the surface after 55 minutes having never made it to the stern, but Sharky swam through the prop-shaft tunnel, which he said was about 10m long and about 2.5m diameter. I’ll definately be back when the visibility is better and the sea is warm, hopefully to explore the wreck in more detail.
We then stopped for lunch. Nick, the boats skipper, had cooked a load of sausages and served with bread and butter with a helping of barbeque sauce, this was most welcome. Copious amounts of tea and coffee were being consumed during the day too. This combined with a bit of sunshine and chat with some newly found buddies made a pleasant surface interval.
Fairylands
The second dive of the day was going to be a reef between Hillsea Point and Mewstone Ledges known as Fairylands. There was no explanation as to why it was called Fairylands, but it was also referred to as Black Rock. Confused? So am I! There was also a wreck of a small fishing trawler, which is named after Black Rock, which is where we were going to be dropped. If we came across any running current we would send up an S.M.B. and drift. The shot was dropped a few metres from the wreck; the visiblity was still not the very good at around 5m. Everyone headed off in different directions, but only a couple of us found the trawler. The small wreck is reasonably intact; the steelwork was complete but all the wooden parts have all gone. Hiding under the stern there were some large wrasse and bib avoiding my camera as best they could, and they succeeded. After swimming around it a few times I decided to have a look at Fairylands.
Fairylands is a series of shallow gullies, covered in a mixture of dead man’s fingers, bryozoans, sponges and the odd anemone with very little fish life. If you swim south it goes deeper, north it gets shallower. I headed west with the current – what there was of it. I had kept a depth of around 21m for the whole 60 minutes of the dive, again getting a little cooled off by the end, so I stayed out of deco. Although it was fairly scenic and ok as a second dive, without the trawler wreck it woud have been a lot less interesting. After the dive was over Sharky said he had seen a thornback ray and a huge crab, but not the wreck!
Contact
Author: Mark Milburn
Email: info@travel-dive.com
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