The Wildlife Trust's North Sea Wildlife Project

Divers delight

On the East coast divers wait impatiently for the late spring when the sea clears. When it does it reveals a treasury of sites which have remained unvisited over the winter - and may not have been visited for years before. The season is short, between the spring plankton clearing and the winter winds building up the waves. This doesn't suit most film makers and so you rarely see them on TV and many divers seem to think it's impossible to dive East Anglia.
 
In the Southen North Sea hard, rocky seabed is at a premium and much (though not all!) of the diving is conducted around wrecks. This small wreck has settled upright in the sandy seabed - in fact the deck is covered with sand too. Much of the hull is still intact, acting as a biodiverse reef, covered in stationary animals such as anemones, sponges and soft coral. Mobile creatures like crabs, sea slugs and starfish hunt over this dense turf. At these depths (around 20m) in the East there is no seaweed as the light levels are too low for much of the year so this an exclusively animal kingdom.
 
The Willowpool was a 120m long cargo ship until she hit a mine in 1939. Like the other shipping loses from war and other causes she has formed an artificial reef ever since. Hard seabed of any kind has great significance in the East as stable communities can establish and form resident ecosystems quite different from those which normally live amongst the shifting sediment covering much of the seabed. Wrecks are not the only hard substrate in East Anglia, in North Norfolk there is a 30km long chalk reef which hosts natural resident communities. Hopefully conditions will allow filming of the reef during the summer both for this site and a BBC documentary which will air in the autumn.
 
Rob Spray and Dawn Watson - Seasearch East.
 
Early June dive photos and video here:
http://www.1townhouses.co.uk/pelagicpixels/2011/NorfolkJun11/