Another trip back to Babbacombe with Dave and Louise. We had planned to dive with Simon and his boat the Grace 2 again, this time the first dive was to the Bretagne and the second to the Galicia.

Unfortunately Simon had called the previous night to tell me that conditions were bad. However the intrepid trio set off regardless bright and early Sunday morning.

As expected when we arrived there was no chance of going out, so we decided to do a couple of shore dives. The only down side was that I had filled my tanks with EAN40, not the cheapest mix to use in depths no greater than about 7 metres. Fortunately Simon lent me one of his cylinders and I dived on air.

The first dive was to the left side of the bay where we kept to the line where the rocks met the sandy bottom. Saw quite a bit along the way, including snakelocks anemones, a pipefish, a large dogfish and lots more that I can’t name. We also saw several pots with lobsters in them.

The second dive was to the right hand side of the bay. As we were about to set off Dave realised that he had forgotten to put his dry suit hose onto the new set of regs that he had set up. So he had quite a tight dive.

As we left the pier we were followed by a huge shoal of small fish, there must have been thousands of them. When we turned we were into some current which made the home journey quite tiring, but we still managed a 72 minute dive, my longest yet.

Not the best of weather, this was the first time that I kept my dry suit zipped up all day, however we had a good time.