“The really big question is, where’s the best place we’ve ever done it?” Tony Dobinson, who has been diving all over the world since he was 20 years old, who has dived the red sea and the Caribbean, glimpsed fish most people only ever sea on TV, whose thousands of hours under the waves have made him a sort of undersea encyclopaedia, grins. “The UK.”
"I’m sorry but it just is,” Tony adds. “I’ve dived all over the world, been to some wonderful spots, but the UK is the best. In some places you get really good visibility – it’s like walking around a garden. You see trees, flowers, more trees and more flowers, maybe you get up close to a flower and notice how pretty it is. When you’ve got good visibility under the water, you get some fabulous scenes. But in the UK you don’t always get good visibility. It’s like visiting a garden in the fog.”
If that sounds strange, that might be because it is. But Tony explains that the reduced visibility makes you stop, think, and consider everything around you. “You’ve got about three metres visibility,” he adds. “So you take all that in and then you move on and take in something else. It changes the pace you’re moving through it.”
What really sets UK diving apart, though, is the variety and density of UK diving spots, which cover everything from undersea reefs, to long-forgotten shipwrecks.
"We have well over 80 dive sites that are reachable from Littlehampton – and around here a lot of them are wrecks,” says Dave Alvarado, a diving instructor who said he got hooked on the sport all the way back in 1995,after a holiday in Barbados. He runs Stormforce Diving here in Sussex, which runs regular coastal charters to a range of spots, catering for a variety of levels.
Of the dozens of wrecks scattered off the coast of Sussex, one of the most popular is the remains of a Mulberry Harbour unit a few miles out from Pagham. One of eighty temporarily stored off the coast in preparation for D-Day, this harbour broke as it was first lifted from the seabed, and now acts almost like an artificial reef, housing a whole ecosystem of marine life, including Black Bream, Tompots and Grey Mullet.
Visiting wrecks like these, week after week, year after year, is a part of what makes local diving so invigorating; divers build a relationship with each site, watching them change and grow alongside the seasons. “Any diver will tell you, you’re in another world down there,” adds Richard Pearce, who photographs his weekly dives for an audience keen to peek under the surface of the waves.
"I’ve been going every Sunday for a long time and it becomes your backyard almost, these places you return to over and over again. You go in at winter and watch things go quiet, you go back in spring and you watch it waking up, and then, as the summer goes on it starts to flourish. You learn the history of the wrecks, and what marine life lives at which reefs. Each dive becomes a place you care about.”
Images: Richard Pearce.
1. "You're in another world down there": divers lift the lid on undersea world in Sussex
Inside the wreck of the Mulberry Harbour Photo: Richard Pearce
2. "You're in another world down there": divers lift the lid on undersea world in Sussex
A Tompot Blennie pokes his head out for the camera. Photo: Richard Pearce
3. "You're in another world down there": divers lift the lid on undersea world in Sussex
A spider crab creeps along a reef. Photo: Richard Pearce
4. "You're in another world down there": divers lift the lid on undersea world in Sussex
Conger eels like this can grow up to over 2 metres in length. Photo: Richard Pearce