Below the surface
Ed Cook takes a break from his day job as a rabbit and pest controller to enjoy one of his favourite pastimes
For some years I’ve been becoming more involved with the sea. I have a great interest in spearfishing, scuba diving and sea fishing. In my spare time I often visit my two favourite parts of the UK – Dorset and the west coast of Scotland, where many of my nautical adventures take place.
The excitement of exploring the deep makes me feel like a child again, discovering new things and never knowing what
I may encounter. I love to see how the underwater terrain changes and how the tides affect fish feeding habits, as well as being able to gather food that I might never have tried were it not for my addiction to the sea.
Beginnings
I learnt to scuba dive about 10 years ago – initially via a one-off course, but I then joined a club to further my capabilities and safety. Some might think UK waters are cold, murky and uninviting, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Visibility can often exceed 10m in periods of calm weather, and temperatures in summer months allow me to do much of my diving comfortably at a depth of up to 30m in a 7mm-thick wetsuit.
A typical dive for me consists of a half-hour RIB trip to a dive site we can see on a GPS system; the sounder allows us to pinpoint the depth and map the terrain of the seabed below. At depths of 18 to 25m, scallops can often be found in large quantities, especially where scallop trawling has been limited.
While I enjoy diving around wrecks, nothing compares to the excitement of a scallop dive. On arriving at the intended dive site, we erect a flag to alert other boats in the vicinity to what we are doing, check our equipment a final time to ensure it is fully functional, and then we dive as a pair.
Descend
As we slowly descend into the depths, we keep a close eye on one another and never drift apart until the seabed reveals itself. Once there, we indicate to each other that all is OK and send up a surface marker buoy to allow those on the boat to know where we are, so that they can follow and collect us at the end of the dive. At this point we are ready to collect some scallops and we alter our buoyancy by adding some air to our buoyancy-control device. We gain just enough to be off the seabed and then we drift with the current or lightly swim as we hunt for the scallops.
It can seem like a lifetime before you see one and dives can draw a blank, but once you get your eye in, you often find they are plentiful. They hide in the sediment of the sea floor and on approach they often close suddenly, dislodging a small cloud of sand. This is when you notice them and the prize ready for collection. Bag and size limits must be observed. These can vary from area to area and year to year, but a cardinal rule is to avoid picking the small ones and remember that everything looks bigger in the water. As we work our way along the seabed collecting our booty, we often see rays, conger eels and the odd crab, all amazing sights.
We work to strict air and time restraints and a plan is always adhered to. We make sure we gradually ascend to our safety stop at the end of our dive, which allows the release of most nitrogen bubbles in our bloodstream and helps to avoid decompression sickness, known as the bends. Unfortunately, in the early days of my diving I learned the hard way and ended up in a decompression chamber. It was entirely my own fault but, thankfully, I was OK. It didn’t discourage me. I learned from my mistake and have safely enjoyed diving ever since.
I love being by the sea, in the sea, and especially at the bottom of it, but I have yet to bump into a sh-sh shark …