Around Mulbury Harbour

By Juliet Savigear on 13 September 2008

Mulbury Harbour, West Sussex

What a great dive that is so easy to get to from London.

As is often the way with my boyfriend, who hates planning anything much ahead, we booked our dive with www.witteringdivers.co.uk late on the Friday afternoon and then made our way down to Wittering bright and early on the Saturday morning.

History

The Mulbury Harbour was an artificial harbour that was intended to form part of a huge floating harbour off the coastline of Normandy for D-Day. However, the pontoons that form the ‘reef’ of this dive site, had drifted off and sunk before they could be towed across the Channel. The Mulbury Harbour now makes a great dive as it sits in 11 meters of water off the West Sussex coast.

The Dive Itself

Although the building blocks of this harbour are somewhat broken up, they form a fantastic home for a huge array of marine life. I have never seen so many nudibranchs on one dive site – you can’t miss the ribbon-like curls of their eggs all over the wreck, so you don’t need to look too far. Bib and bream hang around in the dark crevices and around the back, dead mans fingers cover the most in-tact part of the wreck. Tompot Blennies are to be found popping out of corners all over the place, so keep your eyes open for these cute looking fish. We also came across the delightfully ugly lumpsucker, with warts and tiny shrimps covering his back. And just as we were coming to the end of our dive a large cuttlefish came into view.

This makes a great dive to check out equipment, as I discovered when the line of my SMB got knotted and required a quick release to avoid be catapulted to the surface.

Top dive to take those have not yet dared to venture into UK waters.

Contact

Author: Juliet Savigear
Email: info@travel-dive.com

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