Pembrokeshire 18th Feb 2001

First sea dive of 2001 and Dave and myself were meeting Andy H and Louise at Pont Abraham services at the end of the M4 before driving on to the dive site together. Given the sequence of events we should all probably have stayed at home.

Firstly the clutch cable on Andy’s car snapped. Apparently the idiot who worked on it last time made a mess of putting it together. I wonder who that could have been???

The next problem involved Dave’s car getting stuck on the pebbles at Martin’s Haven, it was eventually removed with help from several assistants, but not before doing some serious damage to the wheel trims.

Finally Dave lost his dive computer.

Well on to the diving. Andy was absent from the first dive at Martin’s Haven because of the clutch cable problem, so Dave, Lou and I ventured forth. The water was very calm and looked very inviting, however as we soon found out the viz was very poor, approx 2 metres. We lost Dave at one point in virtually zero viz and surfaced with Lou, Dave had already surfaced. As we were close to the end of the dive we took a compass bearing and descended to swim home. However Lou could not get back down and so we had a longish surface swim back to the beach.

After meeting up with Andy, and freeing Dave’s car we decided to move on to St Brides to try to get a better dive. This time I buddied Dave, and Lou was with Andy. Given everything else that had happened today we should not have been surprised to find that the viz was less than 1 metre. Dave and I managed a 36 minute dive but the only good thing that could be said was that we had some good compass practice.

Got a little too buoyant at the end of the dive, and I couldn’t even be bothered to try and sink again, so just had a slow surface swim to the beach.

All in all 2 poor dives and all I managed to see was a couple of crabs and 2 starfish. In fact not one of us saw any fish at all.

Finished the day with the obligatory visit to the pub to fill in the log books.

For more pics that were taken see Andy’s dive report.