Our last day
on the Isle of Man, and some hardy souls had got up at the crack of dawn to go
& do a deep wreck. Surprisingly, I’d stayed in bed and wandered down to
Port Mary with the other lazy buggers to catch the boat when it came in at 11am.
Whilst the intrepid were resting, we got the chance to do the fastest drift dive
in the West!
The narrow
stretch of water between the Isle of Man and the Calf of Man (Calf Sound) has a
string of small rocks with seals sunbathing on them, marked with a lighthouse,
is very shallow and needs a local skipper to put you down in the right place. We
were dropped in with fixed SMBs on the NW side, into a depth of 28m, not far
from the site of a previous wreck dive, the Clan MacMaster. 
As soon as we
reached bottom, we saw how fast we were motoring! The sea bed was entirely
covered with dead man’s fingers, sea squirts and anenome, it was like
low-flying over a field. Crabs and little fish scattered before us, and I had to
hang onto Jools’ SMB line to not be separated.
Suddenly, we
picked up more speed and started ascending rapidly as the ground rose steeply
– computers flashing SLOW, but we didn’t really have a choice, as we were
swept up to 10m and travelling at 5 knots. This took us into kelp, and I had to
come up slightly shallower to avoid being slapped about the face by leaves. I
saw John and Nicola to our right about 10m away and wondered if we were on
converging courses – Jools was
having to reel in line that was trailing behind us for miles at this point. As
the water depth increased, we seemed to slow again, we looked behind and saw a
seal tracking us.
Just as
we’d caught our breaths, whoosh, we were off again, our computers by now were
really pissed off with us, and showing deco stops (see dodgy profile). 
We started a
slow ascent, and surfaced in a bit of a swell, propelled way downstream of the
others by this last burst of current, and everyone had a hell of a job getting
me back on the boat. It was the fastest 27 minutes of diving I’d ever done,
and I wanted to do it again! Sadly that wasn’t possible, we had to settle down
for a leisurely lunch and a nice long surface interval, and dived a little bay
aptly called the Puddle, where we played peek-a-boo with seals.
I would
thoroughly recommend a return trip – there are loads of dives, around the S
& SW coast, the scenery above water is as lovely as that below, we stayed in
Port St Erin which is really nice, the natives are friendly and the roads are
empty apart from a few motorbikes.
This fab trip
was organised by Caroline, based on an original concept by Paul Tyson – how he
got away with that one I don’t know!
Bren
Last Edited 12/09/2002