Our dive got off to an inauspicious start! The boat wouldn’t go! We were 150 yards north of the Eddystone reef (itself 9 miles out at sea) in a force 3 southerly wind, and we might was well have been back in Worcester! Fortunately, we were able to get the other RIB to come over, and they towed us in towards the lighthouse. "OK here?" asked Robin. "Dough", I cried nasally from inside my mask, "anudder 100 yards". I wanted us to be dropped in just at the foot of the tower,on the eastern side, so we could swim down the gully to the south and then back up the reef.

I remembered back to the saturday of the "Bath Weekend" in 1995, when I was just back from my first ever open water diving trip - to Hurghada. Surely English diving couldn’t compare to the splendours of the Red Sea? A slightly too big neoprene drysuit had been hired from Elwyn and, after a long slow run out with me as navigator, I had conjured the Eddystone lighthouse out of a rough sea, poor visibility in front of a doubting crew who thought we were completely lost. Malcolm had led me on such a good dive that day on exactly this location that I gave up the idea of only diving abroad, immediately ordered a membrane suit and started UK diving with enthusiasm. Now, with 200-odd UK dives under my belt, we were back at the same site to see if the magic of the Eddystone was still as powerful.

Back in the present, "OK, leds go!", I cried to Henry, my buddy for the day, and we flopped in about 15m from the base of the tower. H (as he likes to be known) hadn’t dived for 6 months, so we dropped slowly down through the none-to-clear water and headed for a patch of coarse sand that had emerged from the murk as we neared the bottom, like a runway through low cloud. I gave the suit feed button a prod on my brand-new, just-arrived-yesterday drysuit in order to get comfortable, and -oh no - either that air’s very cold or else that was water! No matter, it’s more of a trickle than a rush. A check of the compass and we headed south, through a 4-ft wide canyon in the rocks. Little white ‘moon-daisy’ anemones with golden centres studded the walls and some wrasse flit ahead of us into their nooks and crannies. A physically challenged crab sits boldly atop a rock and I pick him up from behind. He seems to know he’s not destined for the pot, just waves his one remaining claw at me, as if to say "you’re surely not that hungry".

The canyon leads on and broadens out. A large iron anchor, 5ft across the flukes, is lying there for the taking home. We heave up the shank - yes - just about possible with some good lifting bags. Not today though. Now we are down to about 20m and enter the land where the jewel anemone is lord. They seem to prefer the vertical surfaces to the horizontal ones (unless they’re overhangs) and the tops of the rocks are onlydotted with them, whereas the sides are so densely packed that it’s impossible to touch any bare rock! Have you seen that TV programme where arty-farty interior decorators apply tiny mosaic tiles to unlikely objects? They’ve been down here too, dammit! ....but rather than making regular patterns, they’ve stuck all the pink ones on first in a swathe an arm’s length across, then all the green ones, then the blue ones and left the brown and yellow ones till last.

A large male cuckoo wrasse comes to my elbow, along with an even bigger ballan wrasse and some pink female cuckoos. I know what they want, and so somewhat guiltily decide to short-circuit the food chain a bit by smashing up an urchin (there were loads within arms reach, honest). Will they feed from my hand? The male cuckoo, his iridescent royal blue and gold flanks gleaming in H’s torchbeam, is a bit shy, and wants his food on the table and not in hand, but the ballan is braver and stabs his blunt snout into the brown spongy innards fo the urchin in my hand. I feel like a child at the zoo, feeding the deer with concentrates from my little 30p bag. This is just as much fun and there’s noone to take the money.

How’s the time? 25 minutes and we haven’t got far yet! We’ve got to get some depth if we’re going to do the Elk after lunch! (at least, that’s what the book says - my Aladin doesn’t seem to mind either way). Strange - as we head on down, it’s getting lighter! No, it really is - at 28m the whole field of view is suffused with a soft white glow. We’re in a padded cell with floor & walls made of four-inch deep-pile white carpet! I long to roll on it like a sheepskin rug, but lamb’s wool is harsh compared with the diaphanous filigree tentacles of these plumose anemones. I’ve never seen so many before -all open wide with their 8" diameter cauliflower-shaped heads and stems covering all the surfaces of the rocks. Wait a minute - this one’s different: the football sized structure has a dozen one-inch diameter red-flecked translucent branches springing from a doughnut sized root. Each flexible branch is covered with star-pointed white ‘flowers’ a centimetre across. I never saw one of these before - memo - find out what it is!

All too soon, we have 30 minutes on the clock and only 2 minutes of no-stop time remaining. Time to head back and start upwards. ‘Let’s go rock-climbing’, I think, sending my thoughts to the relaxed and happy H at my side, and we start up the edge of the first rock, heading north and a bit west to try to find the main reef that breaks the surface to the south of the lighthouse. We reach the top of the rock - mmm - still 17m down! Where’s the next one? Trusting the compass, we free-swim a few yards and there’s a shadowy dark form emerging from the gloom. This one’s better, it’s got kelp - lovely kelp! The fronds are waving in the slight surge and I swim among them. H has his head very close to the wall and I’m ahead and above him. He’s coming up to a ledge and I can see what he can’t - a 15" spider crab just above his line of sight on the ledge. I can’t help but laugh, anticipating the meeting of eyes that is about to happen - and as a result of the smile, my mask promptly floods with water. H rises another foot - no reaction - then he gives a sudden jerk backwards and I know he’s spotted King Klaws. He looks up at me reproaching me for not warning him, but my mask just leaks more and more!

Now we look up for the surface, and find a shoal of a couple of hundred silvery eel-like fish a foot long wriggling between us and the ‘ceiling’. Up a bit more and now we can see the foam on the surface where the waves are breaking on the rocks, and we swim away a little before getting our heads out into the sunnyspring afternoon.

Wow - what a dive! The Eddystone gully is once again the number 1 Plymouth dive for me. I can’t wait to get back and do it all over again!

If you enjoyed Sue Daly's pictures, which were actually taken a hundred miles south of the Eddystone, around Jersey, then visit her website and buy her book about the marine life in the Channel Islands.