I met up with Louise at her office in Bristol where she left her car and we then travelled to Babbacombe in my car. The weather forecast wasn’t very good, and we had 2 showers within half an hour of arriving. However that was the last that we saw of the rain all day.

It was a good job that we arrived early (8:15) as the car park soon filled up, and remained full all day. Lots of divers, mainly trainees.

By the time that we went in for our first dive we were just past low tide and proceeded to head straight out. After the first 50 metres or so the bottom was quite featureless with very little to see, other than some small fish and quite a few crabs.

I was wearing my new X3 fins today and had a cramp twice during the dive. They are more supple than my previous fins and maybe require a slightly different action.

For the second dive we took a bearing on the beach at the far side of the bay. Lou took her camera with her for this dive.

When we reached the turn around point we got some practice with the DSMB. This also allowed me to check our return compass bearing. This turned out to be the longest dive to date, 61 minutes, and this despite blowing an O ring prior to the dive and losing 60 bar of air.

By the time we went in for the final dive the tide was nearly high. This allowed us to explore the rocks and kelp, and for Lou to get some more pics. This was a very relaxing dive, which we had only planned for 30 minutes, however we stayed down for 50 minutes. This relaxing dive was also my lowest SAC to date.

Fortunately Babbacombe has a pub right at the end of the car park, so we didn’t have far to go to fill in our log books.