Babbacombe

Nice easy shore-dive off the beach at Babbacombe with Geoff, to see what was there. It's a good place and very popular for diving, but if you're planning to stop here be warned that the clampers are extremely zealous. Signs tell you that if the ticket machine is broken you may only stay 30 minutes,.. and that if you need to get change that someone must remain with the vehicle! Welcome to Torbay.

We went in around high tide (HW was 09:40). We surface swam over the stony part of the beach and descended in 5m water and continued north out over silty bottom. Eventually (after about ~150m) we came to a stony ridge and the floor dropped a little more and levelled off again at about 10m. The bottom here was similar to that we'd already covered, and later Geoff told me that it was far more interesting the last time he visited; perhaps it had been trawled up. There were also fishing lines and several clumpy tangles of line, and weights. Others have said that Babbacombe beach is a very good wildlife dive, sadly it was a rather silty no-man's-land. There were empty shells, a few scallops and other large bivalves - spiny cockles and mussels open and rotting, and scattered crab remains. There were lots of scavenging hermit crabs (party-time for these guys), some small gobies, fan worms, a few sea squirts, and sea potatoes (in places very abundant). There were a few wobbly clusters of cuttlefish eggs and Geoff saw a baby cuttlefish. I spotted a pipefish, well camouflaged on the muddy bottom, and found it quite approachable. It was a bit out of place here though, they're more usually encountered amongst weed. The delicate tube anemones were very nice, and there were a few whelks creeping about.

Visibility wasn't great, perhaps three metres, with mistiness and suspended particles. We went back toward the beach and at a rock closer to the shore Geoff ascended. Separation occurred on a second descent and we rendezvoused once more at the surface. At this point we decided to call it a day and we swam back in. We had about 45 minutes of diving- a nice steady swim and look around, with good compass and pilotage practise.