Stoney Cove
In Leicestershire, Stoney Cove is a flooded 5-acre granite quarry where we often go for diver training and recreational diving. It's about a 3 hour round trip from Worcester by minibus.

There's a lot to see and do at Stoney. The quarry is flooded on 3 levels: 7m (for training and practicing skills), 20m (where there are loads of things to play with like a shipwreck, a helicopter, and various cars, vans and buses of one sort or another), and 30m (where we don't go).

There are a LOT of fish in Stoney Cove! During a usual day we would expect to see around 250 maybe. Most of them are either roach or perch, but there are also quite a lot of pike in the quarry and we see them regularly too. There are also freshwater crayfish and mussels.
The number of divers using Stoney Cove is colossal. I think some years ago they reckoned on 50,000 diver admissions per annum, and now there are even more. In order to keep a track of who was using the Cove and to attempt to make the place safer, four years ago they introduced a system called 'Diverlog', to computerise their regular clients.

At Kings, we find it is a good option to do early open water training here as the water is clear, the site is very safe and its one less thing to worry about if you start diving in fresh water rather than salt. Normally, to reach the Ocean Diver qualification, we would expect to go 2 or 3 times to Stoney (2 dives each time) and twice to the coast (4 dives each time). For Sports Diver, we would visit Stoney at least once more, in order to do the rescue dives which are part of the training programme. In addition, we often go to Stoney on Wednesday evenings for night diving - this is great fun and often ends with a barbeque as we warm up and discuss our exploits.

Diverlog cards are issued to participating divers upon payment of a fee, and if you don't have a card, they charge an extra £4 per day admission (the daily admission with a card has just gone up to £10). If anyone is interested in sharing in the cost of purchasing a diverlog card (£20 for 2 years, the school to pay half the fee), then please contact Rachael Lee. This would pay for itself on the 5th visit to the quarry, so those who train all the way through from Ocean Diver, via Sports Diver to Dive Leader would certainly get their money back.

If you would like to know more about Stoney Cove, try doing a search on any of the usual search engines. I would have given you their link as http://www.stoneycove.com but it doesn't seem to be working as I write this page.

Page updated 21st Dec 2004