At 4.30 a.m on 25th July 2006, Graeme “Spotty” Hastings and I collected Chris Baker from his home for another “Boys Day Out”, this time to Dorset. Chris was lying in wait with a cup of water to throw over a still sleepy Spotty. What a refreshing start to the day for Spotty!

After an unnecessary detour down the M23 (my fault) we finally arrived at Lulworth Cove, a small circular bay, half a mile in diameter enclosed by cliffs with a narrow entrance to the open sea. Skirting most of the shallow cove is a narrow pebble beach. The seabed near the shore consists of loose stones and rocks covered in a variety of weeds while the central area of the bay has clean rippled sand. Chris took charge of the navigation and led us out of the cove. To my frustration, I had accidentially changed the automatic focus setting on my camera lens to manual focus and so unless a fish happened to be at the precise distance of my preset manual focus, I was unable to take any photographs that were in focus. After this dive (my dive 1267) Chris sorted out a minor repair to my Landcruiser while I went through the motions of assisting him (see photos) and then we headed off to Swanage Pier for our second dive of the day.
 
Nine days later I returned to Lulworth Cove, this time with Chris Powell and Richard Everett. This (my dive 1274) was our second dive of the day as we had already dived Swanage Pier in the morning. We began our dive on the east side of the bay and made our way south across the bay to the far side where I separated from Chris and Richard and slowly finned out of the cove. Returning to the shallows of the bay and just before completing the dive, I was photographing a plaice when suddenly pebbles began to drop down from the surface of the water. Presumably my air bubbles were visible from the shore making me a target for someone’s amusement!

Afterwards, Robert Manestar, another visitor to Lulworth Cove, kindly shared some of his surface photographs with me and suffered the misfortune to be photographed with me.