The Bombardon, The Beast and The Curiosity Park!
Updated: Mar 13, 2020
This weekend we had two great days of diving off Richmond Explorer with a bit of exploring thrown in with training opportunities at Ocean Diver, Sports Diver and Dive Leader levels, plus a bit of boat handling experience.
On Saturday, Gemma finally found the Bombardon in the bay on her second attempt at diving it. It appears the wreck is handily located exactly where the GPS is programmed for it to be (it takes a special kind of person to still miss it!).

3D sonar scan of the Bombardon.
The Bombardon was packed with fish and a conger eel welcoming us onto the wreck. Second dive was an exploratory dive to the Briony Victoria, but we couldn’t find it. If you’ve got any details or experience of it please chat with Gemma. Instead we dived under ‘The Beast’ outside the central breakwater (see photo). It’s an interesting underwater junkyard and the viz is better here than along the inside of the breakwater.

The Beast up close.

Aerial map view of 'The Beast'.
Most trip members camped and had a great night at the Fat Badger. The ribs were as good as their reputation. The Diving Officer was cutting some sharp shapes to the live band!
The wind on Sunday meant that we were restricted to sheltered sites so we did some training near the Dredger and then explored the new ‘Curiosity Park’ at the same location. Top tip for diving this fun site is to descend on the central big white buoy, follow the rope and see what you can see ;-).