I have never been particularly keen on diving in quarries. Nasty dead places with cold water and poor visibility. I suppose it all stems from back when I was a novice diver, we used to sneak past the barbed wire to a disused quarry on the Mendips, wearing my "Cousteau classic" 2 piece sharkskin wetsuit and carrying an old low pressure steel cylinder and character building Snark demand valve.
Subsequent fresh water dives in various locations did nothing to improve my disposition towards quarries, so a few years ago I was somewhat sceptical when Richard Bull suggested Dosthill quarry near Tamworth as an alternative location for some technical instructor training. Alternative to the sea off the south coast that is; a force 7 was blowing.
Still, training is training and there were exercises we had to complete. Having turned off the A5 at the wrong junction and wandered round housing estates for a while we eventually found the quarry tucked away behind the village church.
The car park was filling rapidly. That half-hour of wandering had probably cost us a good 50 yards of carrying full techie kit to the water's edge. I felt a bit silly with all that gear at the side of a quarry only 20 metres deep. Other divers ranged from flocks of diving school beginners with instructors and divemasters playing sheepdog, to local divers out for a bit of practice, clubs conducting advanced diver drills and even a few other divers practising with technical kit ready for the coming season.
There are a choice of entrances to the water, most of which involve jumping off something, but it is also possible to slither in and there is a set of well constructed steps for those who prefer a walking entry. What you won't find is a beach.
Descending to 10 metres we swam along the wall to the shallow end. I was pleasantly surprised by the marine life, there actually was some! Small shoals of perch, the occasional newt, and a few evil looking pike. Visibility was a respectable 6 or 7 metres. I suppose you could also count the ducks quacking about and picking up scraps of bread from the fry-up caravan, but they are hardly an underwater attraction and did not feature in our dive.
Mask removal exercises have never bothered me. I have been doing that sort of thing for years. I just pull the mask off, wave it about and put it back on again. Time came for a complex exercise with no mask on and I didn't really think about it. My mask came off in one go and my eyeballs almost popped out with the cold. By the time I had completed the other parts of the exercise and it was time to put my mask back on it was excruciating.
Shallow water exercises completed we headed back to the deep end to gain some depth to release marker buoys and practice some simulated decompression stops. Round about 12 metres the visibility suddenly dropped to nothing. Working by feel I only knew I had hit the bottom when I my hands and entered the thick layer of silt. 20 metres according to the maximum depth on my dive computer that I could only read afterwards.
Exercises completed we headed for the steps and finally came to the best part of quarry diving, getting out for a freshly fried bacon butty and a hot drink.
As an instructor I have since used Dosthill for a variety of training exercises from basic assessments to advanced diver skills and technical diving exercises. I have even been enthusiastic enough to take my camera along to photograph the pike.
Am I converted to fresh water diving? Definitely not. Diving in a quarry just for the sake of it is not my idea of a fun dive. On the other hand, Dosthill is a convenient site for training and practising drills through the winter months. In the summer it is a good fall back site when a planned coastal dive is blown out by the unpredictable British weather.