If you’re planning a trip and looking for somewhere new to visit there are a number of sources of information available. You could have a look at the CUUEG Trip Reports – someone else in the club might have done all your work for you already! The club also has a number of Dive Guides for the UK which you can borrow from the Expeditions Officer. Divernet (the website of “Diver” Magazine) has articles on UK dive sites, and has very nice Wreck Tours to most of the popular wrecks around the UK. Dive Magazine (the BSAC Magazine) also has articles online about UK dive sites. UKDiving also has some reviews of UK sites. Finally the “Yorkshire Divers” forum is frequented by divers from all over the UK – you’ll almost certainly find someone there who has been where you want to go.
Please remember of course: any new dive site for a CUUEG trip has to be approved by our DO. So – get browsing!
Weather and Tides
You can check whether the tides will be favourable at a particular site either at the POL website or at TideTimes. Some sites have predictions for the next 28 days, for some sites it’s only 7 days. Using this data to calculate when slack water will occur at a particular site can be a complicated business – you can find some tips here. Remember, if you are going out on a boat the Skipper should know when slack will occur.
You can get Weather Forecasts from Metcheck, and Inshore Waters Forecasts from the Met Office. Magic Seaweed is a good resource for predictions of Swell.
Dive Guides
CUUEG owns several dive guides, which any club member can borrow. These books are really nice: they describe hundreds of dive sites, their location around our coast, they contain maps, photos and description of wrecks and information on how they met their demise. This can range from: ‘The Obstruction: lump of metal nobody knows anything about – but it’s there’ to ‘The Aoelian Sky – famous wreck off Swanage, huge freighter, sunk due to….’ etc, etc.
If you’d like to borrow any of the guide books to have a browse, just to see what treasures surround our coast or – even better – if you’d like to scout out some potential new dive sites that CUUEG should try out: please let your Expeditions officer know and he/she will bring the books to the pub.