Excitement and anxiety were building in equal amounts as yet again I was travelling down to the south coast at some ungodly hour!
I would be diving with Rick and Nobby, 2 Yoyo Instructors and Kev another Yoyo DM so a well experienced team where I would be the least experienced! It's a rollercoaster this diving lark, yesterday I was the 2nd highest experienced helping Rick out on a number of AOW and speciality courses in and around Swanage and now back to the bottom of the pecking order!!
The M2 sits in about 35m of water and is completely intact, she was sunk during routeine exercises in 1932.
We descended right on top of the conning tower and started our dive. The plan was to rack up a small amount of deco (gas permitting) and do a full tour of the sub. From the conning tower we went towards the bow (do subs have bows?!) every hole we looked in there were either HUGE conger eels (and I mean Huge, eyes like tennis balls! Ok eyes like 10 p peices!!), big lobsters or blennies or gobies resting. The wreck is absolutely teeming with life, large schools of pollock hang off the sides and as we dropped down at the nose I saw the largest ever edible crab which must have been at least 30cm across and a couple of bass! You can always tell they're bass as Rick makes lip smacking signs underwater - I think he likes to eat them!!
Back towards the stern we came back up towards the aircraft hangers (where nobby was seen off by a blennie guarding his territory!!) and out down to the keel and rudders. There is a huge amount of anenome growth on the sub, in one square metre I counted about 5 different species alone!
Just as I clicked into 1 minute deco, I signalled I had 80 bar and we started our ascent.
A great 45 minute dive, thanks to Rick, Nobby and Kev!
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