Plymouth
Fort Bovisand is a great place to run a club boat trip. The fort has recently been taken over by Danny and Dave who run a company called “Discovery divers”. There is now an accommodation block next to the fort with bunk rooms for divers with Bed and Breakfast at £15 per person per night (2008 prices). There is a small dive shop and café by the water. If shore diving in the quay then you need to use smbs as there is a lot of boat traffic going in and out all day.
Discovery divers Tel: 01752 492722 (Danny 0773 9567752)
Website: http://www.discoverydivers.org
From the Fort you can access the wrecks of the James Eagan layne and the Syclla as well as the Mew stone and surrounding wrecks. It’s a very long drive to both the JEL and Scylla and we used a whole boat can of fuel on each boat on the last trip on one return journey. The only other place where it might be possible to launch from that is closer to these sites is Cawsand on the West side of Plymouth sound. The Mew stone is a lot closer and easier to get to.
The Scylla is a new intact frigate sunk recently deliberately for divers. The seabed is about 24m, but that’s lots to sea on the upper decks for ocean divers. There are a number of large holes cut in the side for diver access, but care must be taken doing wreck penetration as the rooms are getting quite silty and the wreck is started to degrade. Last time we dived it there were squid sighted near the bows with lots of corals growing on the hull and lots more life.
Scylla wreck tour: http://www.divernet.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?id=1395&sc=&ac=d&an=
GPS 50 19.64N 04 15.20W (degrees, minutes and decimals). The GPS coordinates on Divernet are out by a whole degree of longitude.
Other sites in the area that ocean divers can do are the Glen Strathallen and the Mew stone.
Location map: http://www.multimap.com/maps/?hloc=GB|bovisand
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