Diving Devonshire Bay - Piers Boileau Goad
On a beautiful August day I met up with Sam Bennet of Ecodive here in Bermuda, at Devonshire bay, specifically Mary Prince park. It’s hot here, yet not just hot, it’s humid too. Just standing around chatting to Sam about the plan made me break into a sweat. Having decided on a plan, basically walk into the water and scooter out along some old cables until we hit 40m, have a bimble and head back. Total run time should be about 2-2.5 hours.
Bermuda Flag
Jumping into my J2 base layer and into my drysuit (yes i dive dry here) made me break out into a flood of sweat. An interesting product I’ve found over here to combat dehydration is something called ‘Liquid IV’. I normally have a pint or so of this before diving and then potentially a second after the dive, otherwise lots of water. Since doing this sort of routine I’ve not had any issues whereas before with inky water I have felt pretty awful. I digress.
Devonshire Bay
Taking our scooters down to the water, and my bailout we returned to the vehicles one last time to put my unit on and Sam’s sidemount Flex 2 (part of the XCCR family that he had procured for coral reef monitoring. In the water – BLISS! The outside temperature was something around 31 degrees with 80%+ humidity so of course the water felt good. Bailouts on, scooter leash adjusted and all final checks done, we submerged into milky dark water.
Scooter speed on 40% we headed out to sea feeling the surge of each wave, our scooters fighting it valiantly. Scooter speed now 70% with the water getting even shallower, about 1m at this point we twisted and turned between rock formations battling swell to get to sea. Devonshire bay has a very shallow reef protecting it, hence having to shallow up a little before heading down after leaving the bay. At around the five minute mark we had managed to find 10m, 20m just after 11 minutes, and finally starting our descent at about minute 28, still following the cables.
The Seacraft Go DPV
The vis had gone from less than 2 metres of milky water in the bay, following Sam only by focusing on his blue fins, to a lovely blue 30m plus at our bottom. We were both using air as diluent so the po2 of air at 40m is a gnats hair over 1 meaning that I wouldn’t want to go past this in order to do an effective diluent flush.
As we hit 40m Sam stopped to see if I was ok receiving the affirmative while I also said that this should be our bottom. Having agreed we decided to stay here and have a look around, see what we could find and potentially grab a lionfish or two.. The landscape down here is rocks, coral (including some sort of brown, finger like furry “trees”, sorry Tom)and clean yellow sand with of course lots a multitude of various colours and patterns of fish. Sadly, we saw lionfish so Sam pulled out his spear and bam, the first one went into the box!
We spent a good ten minutes looking for lionfish at 40m before deciding to head slowly back along the cables to our entry point finishing out 11 minute stop at 3m being thrown around what felt like directly under the breaking surf, being carried with the waves both horizontally and vertically.
Lionfish an invasive species in the Caribbean
An hour and thirty minutes into the dive we found a nice big open area of sand and Sam suggested we do some skills so it was a quick bailout followed by a hypoxic skill and we headed back once again along the cables. Zigging and zagging along them we returned to the milk and murk of Devonshire bay and left the water 2 hours and 16 minutes after we submerged having been on our scooters for 99% of it. My little Seacraft go had been on full power to break through the surf and done very well indeed for her first proper outing finishing the day with a little under 50% of her battery remaining.
Divers actively spear them during dives
All in all, a very good day out. We will do the same again next Sunday, hopefully with less surf to contest with and maybe even a load of photos!
Gas: 21%
Max depth: 42.9.
Runtime: 136 minutes.
Temperature at depth: 22 degrees.
Temperature on deco: 27 degrees.
Scooters: Seacraft Go.
Dive buddy: Sam Bennet of Ecodive www.ecodivebda.com
It might be that we use this site to see how deep the cables go, if we get get that far anyway! My suspicion is that we can certainly get 60-70m from it, probably deeper as we must be nearing the edge of the seamount on the south side of the island.
Apres dive reward Sam’s lionfish ceviche
Editor’s Note: Thanks Piers, not just a dive write up because it highlights the problem of Lionfish where they have no natural predators.
