Photos from the April 2007 trip to Falmouth and Porthkerris

The 2007 season was kicked off with a camping and diving trip to Falmouth and Porthkerris where we dived from Falmouth’s Castle beach and on Drawna reef at Porthkerris beach.

We mostly traveled down to the Retanna Holiday park where we’d got various static caravans, tent pitches and sites booked for our motley collection of divers and their families.

Saturday dawned with an 8.30 briefing in the nice warm static caravan before heading off to the Castle beach in Falmouth for a day of shore diving looking for the famous submarine wrecks.

We pitched up at the top of the beach, strategically near the toilets. There was a nice clean concrete platform at the top of the beach which is ideal for our basecamp. After important preliminaries including coffee and cake we got in for a first dive to begin trying to find the submarines.

No joy in finding the subs but reinforcements arrived at lunchtime courtesy of the Esnouf’s huge minibus. After a good interval (to allow the tide to come back in from the end of the reef……) we got in for a second dive with the aim being to use the marks from dive directory to locate at least one of the wrecks. Wind was picking up and swimming out to the approximate location was quite hard work, but we got roughly to where we thought we should be.

We descended to a kelpy seabed at ~4m and found only rocks and kelp – so much for navigation. After about 1 hour of dive time most people had drawn a blank but one pair did stumble across one sub, just opposite the toilet block , about 30m from where we’d camped!

Sunday the wind was not great for the Falmouth site (and we were all a bit bored wth 5m dives in sand and kelp) so we relocated to Porthkerris to visit their famous Drawna reef. The cloudy skies soon cleared and we had a lovely day on the beach with very good weather a got rather sunburned. Two new members joined us and got to dive the reef’s kelp forest and the associated rocks. We even found a wall covered with nearly every color of jewel anemones – lovely.

After two good dives on Sunday we retired to the campsite having booked a RIB dive from the dive centre on Porthkerris beach to dive out at sea.

Monday the weather was rather rough so we couldn’t get on the Manacles reef sites. Instead we dived the Volnay which proved be a very good site with lots to see. A shot was already positioned on the boilers and we dropped right between them. The cargo of antipersonel munitions was scattered across the seabed and lots of lead balls were found near the bow.

After the dive the rain really came down so we gave up on the second dive plan and retired to the three tuns in St Keverne for lunch before beginning the long drive home.