Get wet at the weekend (Stoney Cove)

Name: huddro

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Product:	Stoney Cove
Date:	31/07/01 (1255 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Location, Safe Diving, Good training area

Disadvantages: Lots and Lots of Divers

Stoney Cove Leicestershire is now the premier inland dive site in Europe. Most UK Divers take Stoney Cove for granted as a regular weekend dive site but for those of you who do not know it let me take you on a tour:

Location

Stoney Cove is located on Sapcot Road just outside Stoney Stanton, Leicestershire. From London take the M1 north to junction 20 and then about 10 minutes after this you arrive in Stoney Cove. The total trip takes a couple of hours and it is worth setting out early, as Stoney is incredibly popular.

Dry Tour

Arriving at Stoney you will be asked to sign in on their registration scheme that costs £9 for a days diving. If you plan to be a regular visitor it is worth applying for their ?Diverlog? registration scheme that gives a discount on entry and means you do not have to complete paperwork every time you visit, obviously this is for a small fee!

You have the choice of two car parks on site and a third across the road. The waters edge car park fills extremely quickly and I have only ever managed to park there once. Neither car park is a million miles from the water but on a hot day with all your gear on the top car park can seem like it!

Walking towards the water the first building on the left is the dive centre. This comprises of an air station, although at weekends it is worth taking spare filled cylinders yourself as you can wait up to 2 hours for a refill. Next door to this is the dive shop selling a good range of equipment and accessories to replace those broken straps and clips. Here you can also book PADI approved courses.

To your right is the water and as you walk you will see the first entry point known as the ?Bus Stop?. This is a timber and scaffold pole assembly that looks like a bus shelter allowing entry to the novice area.

The next entry point on your right is the slipway at the end of a low path area, again giving access to the
novice area. Pleas
e exercise extreme caution using this entry point, as it does get slippery, as my fractured thumb shows!

Opposite the slip way is the shower block and changing area, my advice is to change by your car as most people do and wait till you get home for a shower. This is a cramped building and gets a little dirty towards the end of the day. Next door to this is the wet counter selling snacks and drinks and then a little further round is the pub selling, well pub stuff!!

Wet Tour

OK enough of this wandering round lets get geared up and take the plunge and I?ll give you the full underwater tour, and I won?t even insist you are fully qualified.

Entering from the bus stop we find ourselves in the novice area with a total depth of 7 metres. Checking we are clear we descend slowly and today we are lucky we have 3 metres visibility. Alas with Stoney cove visibility can get down to about half a metre.
Swimming northeast we come to an open room that we can swim through, this is the basement of the pub above. After a quick pint we swim southwest to the edge of the novice area, follow the slope towards the intermediate area and encounter our first wreck. This is the cockpit of a viscount aircraft we can swim to the rear of this and inside for a pilots eye view of the bottom!

You may have noticed by now the number of fish here. I bet you are surprised at how close they come to us. After many years the fish are not at all worried by the divers and live quite happily together. Sometimes if we are really lucky the pike will come pay a visit near the aircraft. At about a metre in length with a mouth full of teeth he is a fantastic sight; guess we are not going to be lucky today.

Leaving the plane behind we descend further down the slope to 20 metres, this is only accessible normally if you have completed the PADI Advanced Diver qualification, as it?s you I?ll take you anyway.
We turn northeast and swim for a few
minutes and find our first wreck here, a submerged Wessex helicopter that we can explore. Turning southwest we swim towards the edge of the intermediate ledge passing a bus that if we wanted to we could swim into. We carry on swimming watching as the bottom drops away and we hang suspended in the semi darkness and experience fully that amazing weightless feeling divers achieve.

A few minutes more swimming sees us over a solid bottom where we also find another submerged aircraft and also the latest addition a tugboat sunk with all its hatches welded open so we can swim inside and explore the darkness of the sunken ship.

After a quick air check we prepare to head down again to the expert area and bottom at 30 metres. Swimming northeast we descend again feeling the eeriness as the light fades, good job we bought those under water flashlights. Down this deep all the fish seem very pale. We head south east swimming round the base of the intermediate area shelf to find our final wreck a sunken galleon long taken over as an artificial reef by all sorts of plants and algae.

Alas down here we use up air very quickly and it is time for us to ascend and head out of the water. Turning north we start to swim slowly towards the surface up through the intermediate area again up again to the beginner area, there seems to be so many new divers learning here after the solitude of the expert deep area.

Finally we surface at the slipway and exit the water taking a final look across the surface where not a bubble shows from the hundreds of divers below the surface. Well I hope you enjoyed your first swim at Stoney time for a cuppa.

General Information


The dive site is open weekdays from 8.30 to 4.30 and weekends from 7.00 to 16.00 the shop is open weekdays 08.30 to 17.00 and weekends 07.00 to 17.00 and with an approximate 100,000 divers visiting last year you can see why I recommend getting there early.

Night Div
es are available on the 1st and 3rd Wednesday every month if you want to give this try. To be honest I personally think night dives are only worthwhile where the coral will give a light show, somewhere like the Red Sea.

As with all dive sites you and your dive buddy must be qualified to either PADI Open Water or the equivalent BSAC as a minimum standard, or be training with a registered agency or club.

Stoney Cove does have its own website http://www.stoneycove.co.ukfurther information or you can contact them directly:
Stoney Cove
Sapcoat Rd,
Stoney Stanton,
Leicester
LE9 4DW.
Tel: 01455 273089 (shop)
01455 274198 (The Cove public house)

Enjoy your diving

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