Raglan's Reef, The Manacles

By Mark Milburn on 1 October 2008

The Manacles

Situated on the eastern side of the Lizard is a series of pinnacles that have caused many a wreck over the years. They are exposed to the weather and some strong currents, this means a great feeding place for all sorts of marine life. It has been several months since I dived Raglans Reef, which is one of the pinnacles that do not break the surface, and it was about time. We headed out on Shaun’s boat ‘Redeemer’ for our usual Friday night 6pm dive. It wasn’t long before we got there and jumped in the water.

One of the U.K.’s prettiest reef’s

The current was already running a little so I made my way to the rocks as quickly as possible. There are some big drop offs around the Manacles, the biggest being the sheer 50m drop on Pen-Wyn, Raglans drops down to around 45m. I wasn’t interested in going deep on this dive, I was only interested in the Jewel Anemones which are in the water down to about 30m. As soon as I spotted the rocks I could see the Anemones everywhere, I fired up the torch and tried to decide what to photograph first. The range of colours is amazing, green and purple, pinks, green and orange, green orange and pink, orange and white, yellow and pink, I could go on for ages but that would be boring. There is a wide variety of life, feather stars adorn the rocks constantly grabbing bits from the water. Dahlia Anemones are found dotted around especially in the shallows, Pink Sea Fans fight for space with Plumose Anemones. For some reason the Plumose Anemones were not out but the Jewel Anemones were, there was certainly enough current, perhaps a little too much for the Plumose Anemones. Dead Mans Fingers are scattered around as are Cup corals.

Cuckoo Wrasse are always fascinated with divers, the ones on Raglans wouldn’t leave me alone, one even bumped into my strobe arm. There are some big Ballen and Corkwing Wrasse around, none of them seemed too bothered about me. The only disappointing thing about the whole dive was that the visibility wasn’t too good, around about 6m, probably caused by the recent bad weather. I did intend to get a few wide angle shots but the visibility wasn’t good enough for that, so I ended up with a lot of close up shots of Jewel Anemones.

With the combination of Jewel, Plumose and Dahlia Anemones Raglans Reef has got to be one of the U.K. prettiest dives.

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Author: Mark Milburn
Email: info@travel-dive.com

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