Hazel Grove Sub Aqua Club
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Latest news:
| BSAC's coveted Heinke Trophy has been won by Clidive, a London-based dive club. |
| Military divers have tagged 15 sharks off the island of Cocos in Costa Rica. |
| Divers have found bottles of 200-year-old champagne in a wreck in the Baltic Sea. The bottles are believed to date from 1780s and were probably a cargo en route to Russia. |
| The Marine Conservation Zone Project has launched an interactive online map showing where marine species have been spotted and where different underwater habitats are located around the UK coast. |
| The UK franchise of technical diver training agency IANTD has been bought by Martin and Amy Stanton, who own inland dive site Vobster Quay. |
Diving In British Waters
Wreck diving is one of the most popular pastimes of the average British diver. The bulk of a ship that has laid undisturbed on the sea floor for years or decades holds a certain thrill be it in the UK or abroad. It is fortunate then for those who dive in the UK that Britain is blessed with more ship wrecks than any other country in the world. The best estimate of the number of ships lost in our coastal waters is over a quarter of a million. With Hundreds of thousands being lost around North wales and angelsey alone. Most of these shipwrecks are the result of collisions, storms and bad navigation. There is also the large number of casualties from the First and Second World Wars - a number nearing 7500. If that isn't reason enough, it may surprise you to learn that life is no less prolific on some UK wrecks than if you were diving in some tropical lagoon.
If that has not whetted your appetite, look to the UK's reefs to do so. Under the water in the UK it is as beautiful and varied as it is on the surface. We have extensive cave systems, deep wall dives, picturesque sandy bays, piers, fast flowing drifts, rocky chimneys, fissures and gullies and cold water reefs. All of these harbor life and the life found in our temperate waters is found in abundance. We have sharks, seals and otters. We have conger eels, seahorses, octopus, cuttlefish and shoals of fish in huge varieties.
However, if you have done your diver training in warm water and want to make the switch to cold water, there are some considerations to be made. Journeys out to dive sites can be grueling with the traditional British weather turning even the strongest of stomachs. The visibility can be chronically bad, the water is cold - sometimes only 3 to 4°C, and the amount of extra kit you have to carry means it is not possible to change over from warm water diving to cold water diving instantly. This said Hazel Grove Sub aqua club, will guide you through all the required training for you to enjoy the best diving the UK has to offer.
These points are all worst cases. And even worst cases are more than tolerable once you get to understand what conditions will be like. Did you know that seasickness disappears instantly as soon as you get in the water? If the visibility is bad, so what? It means you can take the opportunity to notice the detail that you would otherwise have missed. Hermit crabs moving over the sand leaving behind distinctive trails, the beauty of a shell encrusted piece of rusty metal that you would otherwise have dashed past, the rush as a fish suddenly darts into view before disappearing again into the dark and never knowing quite what you may come across until you are on top of it. Many sites in the UK have good visibility towards the end of the summer and Cornwall and Scotland are blessed with good visibility for most of the year. Our Club has been known to Dive Anglesey into October.
As for the cold, technology has provided us with dry suits and dry gloves. I have been colder on some tropical dives than I have on some of my UK ones, where I have been huddled cosily inside my under suit inside my dry suit. And summer sea temperatures can reach 18°C . Go on - try it, you'll find there's a whole new side to diving that you never realised existed!