On 31st October 2008 my Ashford Dive Club buddy Chris Powell and I dived Buckland Lake near Cliffe in Kent. Fellow club members Rick Stewart and Richard Everett would have joined us but had been put off by the weather forecast of persistent rain. Fortunately for Chris and I the forecast was wrong.
This old chalk quarry had been flooded about forty years earlier. In 2008 part of the 60 acre former pit had been opened as a 16 metre deep lake for diving by Steve & Linda Potter’s Polaris Scuba. Work on the construction of the dive centre was underway when Chris and I arrived. Car parking places were notably limited but as Chris and I were the only divers this was not an issue. Underwater attractions already placed in Buckland Lake included training platforms, a Malaysian Sigma aircraft and somewhere in the lake the remains of an old quarry train. According to the Polaris Scuba records, my Channel Divers buddy Stefan Heathfield had been the last diver in the lake when 48 hours earlier the water temperature had been 13º and the underwater visibility 4 to 5 metres. But following unseasonably bitter weather and heavy rainfall, Chris and I discovered that the water temperature had fallen to 11º and the underwater visibility was 2 to 3 metres. Linda said that her Dive Centre would introduce plants into the lake to generally improve the visibility.
We began our dive, my dive 1584, by finning from the entry pontoon in an easterly direction, the lake bed dropping away to a depth of 11.6 metres. In poor light and visibility and with nothing of interest too see, let alone any fish life, we decided to changed direction and headed west instead. In shallower water we came across Caitlin, a small cabin cruiser, the Sigma jet aircraft, a flat bed lorry trailer being used as a training platform and also entered the remains of an old pump house. Linda had warned us that we probably would not see any fish life and unfortunately she was right. With 2 to 3 metres visibility and dark green water, underwater photography was challenging and I concentrated on taking photographs of Chris, getting close to him with my Tokina lens at its 10.5mm setting so that the volume of water between my lens and Chris was at its absolute minimum. Even so my photographs were disappointing. A month earlier I had dived Trearddur Bay, Gwynedd in the UK in similar underwater visibility but with better light and less green water and my photographs were far better.