St Just Pit Falmouth

By Mark Milburn on 27 September 2008

A Diver friend of mine, Andy, works on an Oceanographic survey vessel, he works six weeks on and six weeks off. Every time he comes back from a working trip he wants to get in the water as soon as he can. He got back on Thursday and asked me what diving I was doing, I explained the problem we have been having with the weather, mainly the wind, and that the sea was too rough to go out. On Saturday I was in the local dive shop chatting with the owner, Colin, and he said they were going to dive the St Just pit in the Falmouth estuary as part of an advanced Nitrox course they were running, and there was room on the boat if we were desperate to dive. As always we were desperate to dive, so Sharky, Andy and I turned up in Falmouth to leave the quay at 12:00.

Torn Neck Seal

As I climbed aboard carrying my dry suit, I caught the neck seal on something sharp and it tore a piece out of it, arrrggghh! Everyone one said, don’t try it, but I wanted to dive. I decided to enter last, just in case I was the first out after five seconds. We headed to the shotline, I prepared myself for the worse as I started my descent, nothing yet, got to the sea bed at 18m, still no leaks. I had descended a couple of metres away from the shot, which was actually not a good idea, the vis was less than that, I lost sight of the shot and everyone else, that always happens sooner or later anyway. There was a little tide running that was taking us out to sea, it was only going to run for another twenty minutes, then a little slack and turn back. The current seemed to be trying to take me deeper, the estuary reaches around 38m at its deepest, it was dark enough at 24m, so I decided to swim across the current and try to maintain this depth.

Its the sort of dive where you will not see anything big, unless you are really lucky, you have to look for the small things, my forte really. As I went downstream I spotted several small decorator crabs, common pipefish, dead man’s fingers, scallops, edible crabs and green crabs. There was indeed a lot of life, albeit small, and lots of things to photograph. Slack water came and I rose up the bank a couple of metre and started heading upstream, it wasn’t long before the current started again and joined me.

Rays

On the way upstream I gradually got shallower, taking photos of more decorator crabs, tube worms, a small long spined bullhead and nudibranch eggs, they are strange, a spiral of thousands of eggs, they look greater in volume than any nudibranch I have ever seen! As I carried along merrily looking at all the small things I came across what is probably the biggest thing in the estuary, a Thornback Ray, and it was a decent size one too. Trying to get it in focus with less than 2m vis wasn’t easy, in fact it was too green to get a decent photo, so I have a green photo. Further along and a little shallower again there were more nudibranch eggs, tube worms, several small fish hiding in shells or in holes in the sand, a single snakelock anemone, a huge snail, the shall must have been around six inches in length and a smaller snail on a piece of a dead crab. One more anemone and a very nice tube worms and I decided that it was time to come up.

64 minutes later in 6 degrees of water and 84 pictures in my camera I surfaced, everyone on the boat was watching me, they had all been there for at least fifteen minutes, had my neck seal leaked, NO, but I am going to replace it. The sun was now out, the skies were clear, the wind was still freezing, I kept 47 photos, and I have put eighteen of them on the Travel Dive Gallery, not a bad day at all.

Contact

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

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