Kimmeridge and Environs for Weekend Divers

Some Information for Sunday's Divers

Kimmeridge Bay

For those lazy summer days when you want a long, leisurely, shallow dive with tons of life in the shelter of a beautiful Dorset bay, Kimmeridge is difficult to beat. There's an entry fee payable at the warden's hut as you drive into the area, and a launching fee if you want to boat-dive. Entry to the dive is, from our experience, best NOT over the rocks at the end of the car parking areas, but down the old slipway. This leaves you a short swim to the rocky areas to the southeast, but clambering over the rocks with diving kit on won't save you much time and is very uncomfortable. On a high tide we had depths to 5m, on the low tide we were often quite literally on the surface through the dive, drifting over the rocks and seaweed. Viz was excellent on our dives - a good 6-8m and on a sunny summer day the light was almost too bright. A profusion of seaweed, blennies, gobies, wrasse, crabs, and little shellfish gave more than enough interest to keep us busy for over an hour and a half, not to mention a fantastic large cuttlefish well out into the bay.

As well as the diving there's excellent clifftop walking around the area, good rockpooling, and an interesting marine centre down by the slipway where non-divers can find out what there is to see underwater and divers can find out what the wardens are particularly interested in getting reports of. For non-divers, the shallow depths make snorkelling a real pleasure and a snorkeller could easily help out with filling in seasearch forms.
A highly recommended dive site!

Wreck of the Binnendijk

I've had a few mediocre winter dives on the wreck of the 'Benny', and one absolutely top class spring dive in superb visibility. On the latter I had a 45-minute bottom time in mid-twenties bottom depths, starting towards the stern of the wreck and being awed by the scale of the wreck. Hard to get an overall impression on one good dive other than of large scale and many good upstanding sections. One to go back to.

Ringstead Bay

The bay is identifiable from the sea in that it lies just west of the point where sloping coastline on the Weymouth side gives way to the cliffs which characterise the coast along to Lulworth. It is also reasonably well sheltered at the western end from easterlies if you tuck well inshore, and my ~20m drift was tucked well in to the shore for that reason. We had a ~2kt drift, mostly over gravel and sand in long linear ripples broken up by infrequent low rocky outcrops. At first there seemed to be little life, but once you get your eye in the seabed is full of tubeworms, hermit crabs, scallops, whelks, and, to our surprise and delight, many Thornback rays. We saw four on our dive - two larger (~50cm across) adults, one smaller (~30cm across) and one very small (~15cm across) which we suspected might have been a juvenile. Others drifting in the same area saw one or two rays, and also spotted dogfish. The area also proved excellent for collecting scallops.

Acknowlegements to Tim's Homepage!