A personal snapshot on changes noticed over the 20 years I have dived, snorkelled and freedived Selsey using my logbook entries from those sessions.
A diver’s logbook is a record of the dives that they complete, it shows your progression and and provides a window into your adventures. It is a truth that over time for many divers this logbook entry becomes shorthand including only the minimal required information, if they even keep one at all. My diving buddies, students and family have made fun of the fact that I keep detailed logs on every dive even 20 years later, making comments like “are you writing a sequel to War and Peace?”. Jokes aside I now have a personal record of sightings and changes that I can refer to, unnoticed at the time but looking back things begin to emerge.
CHASM cam about from questions raised during the interviews for Seas The Day, that included changes noticed by fisherman and others. The marine environment has in fact seen more changes in the over the last 15 years than in the previous 100 years. In this article I look back through my logs and and observations on what just some of the changes in the underwater landscape look like to me.
The Selsey seabed is a dynamic environment, every winter storms and weather will rearrange the underwater scenery. Shingle and sand shift, revealing and covering new items. I got in after one long winter and found a sun dial, emerging from the seabed and have surfaced from a dive too early, as I came across a sand bar that was not there before, resulting in a long surface swim to shore. Discovered a new snorkel site not far from the East Beach ramp of an old mini van, that was covered up again by shingle the following winter. Sediment moves as part of the natural processes; you only need to look at Kirk Arrow spit on the West Side of the Bill, clearly visible at low water. I remember when we used to bring the boat in there, it would not be possible now.
Personally some of the biggest changes I notice have come in the marine life. My earliest dives I was always keen to record my favourite sightings of the tiny but beautiful blue ray limpets. Their electric blue markings and clustered groups always made my day. At Selsey I would find them on the long stands of sugar kelp, spread across the bottom. I stop seeing the kelp from the shore dive and in the last decade have not seen the tiny limpets that call it home. Tompot Blennys were plentiful enough that every diver mentioned seeing them, photographers loved the patient way they posed for pictures. Over the time the sightings reduced in number until they were recorded in my log in one dive in ten.
Not all changes have been in the form of absence or reduction in life, my logs recording my excitement at the first starfish I saw from the beach to seeing them be mentioned in passing as they appear so frequently. Increases in the numbers of bait fish have been matched by seeing larger bass and mackerel, hunting them along the beach. Just three years ago seeing not one but two juvenile sting rays on a sunny July day resting “wings up” under the boats.
My logs bear out my feeling that winters are longer, storms more frequent and stronger, with the water warmer in the summer. Nature has cycles, maybe I have captured a small part of that. I do know that 20 years on I am still excited that I am still seeing things for the first time and welcoming back favourites every year. Change has happened and will continue to happen, but now we need to work out how much is nature, how much are we causing or influencing change and what can we do to preserve this wonderful seascape, I am lucky enough to call an office.
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