Fourth Time Lucky: Kyarra, 6th April

[tom]

When I told Special K about my plan to go down to Swanage and dive the Kyarra three times in two days, he politely suggested I had an unhealthy interest in it . OK, he might have had a point. However, it's a wreck I'd wanted to do for a while, and three different attempts to dive it last year were blown out. So you can't blame me for persistence!

The plan was to go out on Mary Jo (www.kyarra.com) once on Tuesday and twice on Wednesday, with slightly different groups of buddies. As it turned out, the weather forecast turned nasty on us so Wednesday was cancelled. However, the two of us who were down on the Tuesday managed to go out (and indeed had the whole boat and whole wreck to ourselves ).

The day was really good fun. I hadn't dived off Mary Jo before, and I was impressed with both the boat and the skipper Martin, who made us feel really welcome. It's only a very short trip out to the wreck as well, which makes a nice change.

We had a fairly short (37 min) but pleasant dive, working our way from the shotline amidships back towards the stern (which we didn't actually reach - we drifted off the wreck when we reached a flattened area towards the back, and deployed the DSMB from there). There wasn't an enormous amount of life (one conger, three lobsters, a couple of crabs, some tompots and a few wrasse) - guess it's still fairly early in the year. I was hoping for some trophies (bottles etc) but the only ones we found were broken. Vis was pretty good at 4m or so, and temperature was a balmy 8c. Max depth 28m. Back on the boat, after a cup of tea we looked a the plan of the wreck and realised we'd only covered a tiny portion of it. Plenty to see on future dives!

Back to Swanage, and we decided to have a second dive under the Pier. Unlike the last time I dived here, vis was pretty good at about 5m. There was more life than last month - much more 'vegetation' and the kelp has started growing. Again, a surprising lack of the famous Swanage spider crabs though - wonder why? A pleasant bimble anyway, until our hands got too cold after about 40 mins.

All in all - a good day out. And I finally got to dive the Kyarra.

[DanE]

Glad you enjoyed it. I've yet to have a bad dive on the Kyarra (tempts fate with a slice of cake...)

Martin's a top bloke as well, he let us use his shotline on Saturday when the echo sounder failed on our club rhib when we got out to the Kyarra. (it had worked on the previous week's shakedown on an yachting lake!)

dan