Two days of hardboat diving in the wreck capital of England. Excellent visibility, lots of fun, with good company. Well, that is how it was sold to me, & that is pretty well how it turned out, or would have done if I hadn't spent the whole of the second day feeling (& being) sick.

Day 1:The Rosehill James Eagan Layne

Both of these dives were reputed to be excellent dives with the Eagan Layne occupying a place in the top 100 British dives. Dave & I dived on 2 x 12l twinsets with everyone else being on either the same, single 15l or in Johns case a rebreather. The Rosehill was pretty bashed up, being comprised mostly of wrecked & twisted metal, but at 30m deep is not to be underestimated as a dive. Clearly this trip was only open to experienced Club Divers & above & this fact caused at least one Maldives Diver to be refused on the trip due to inexperience. The dive itself was excellent, we saw several conger eels hiding amongst the wreckage, & plenty of fish life swimming around. We managed a 41 minute dive going into decompression after 20 minutes at the bottom requiring stops on the ascent. We went for 15m, 12m & 6m as our chosen stops with 3 minutes spent at 6m.

The Eagan Layne was our next stop but with quite a journey ahead of us, we settled down to enjoy the journey, get some food & drink sorted out & generally relax. It was two hours later that we were doing our buddy checks ready to jump in. The shot line on the Eagan Layne takes you to the topmost part of the wreck which is at a mere 7m from the surface. The bottom of the wreck, however, lies in 21m, so again, requires thoughtful planning to ensure a safe dive. It was easy to see why this dive rated in the top 20 dives, it was awesome & many dives would be needed to fully explore the wreck. We had 36 minutes before starting our ascent, with a dive time of 48 minutes, including 5 minutes at 6m & 2 minutes at 3m to ensure we were as off-gassed as possible.

The journey back to shore was quick, made quicker by the smiles & talk of the superb wrecks we had dived that day.

Day 2:The Persier and Fairyland

We decided on the Persier as our first dive of the day. This had been recommended to us as a good dive well within our capabilities. It sits in 30m of water not too far out. The weather and conditions were somewhat worse than yesterday, so the shore soon vanished from view - bad news for those of us who relied on the horizon to avoid sea-sickness. In fact, as the day wore on, we all started to feel a little unwell, and were, therefore, quite pleased to get in and descend to calmer waters. The Persier is well wrecked, but the boilers are in good condition and there are a couple of interesting swim throughs. We saw an enormous Conger eel hidden in the wreckage, but declined to irritate it on the rather sensible grounds that it would probably take offence and eat us whole. Another decompression dive, this time arriving after 25 minutes of diving. where we started our ascent, giving a total dive time of 41 minutes.

Dive two was planned to be a reef drift dive, but when we arrived, everyone felt terrible, I was sick twice and almost aborted the dive, but considered that once I was in, I would feel much better so we went for it with the minimum of buddy checking - no-one dared look down long enough to check anything. The dive itself was excellent and being a drift dive at about 20m required the minimum of effort. There were crabs, dogfish and other reef life to look at. We dreaded getting out as we felt good and knew that once on the boat, the sea-sickness would strike again.

All in all, an excellent two days out, well worthwhile. The visibility was excellent throughout, being in the order of 15m. All dives were good, but the Eagan Layne was the best by some margin, and one I am keen to repeat.