Club spotlight: Scarborough South Bay Scuba dive club

Here, club member Libby Daly tells us a little about the club and what they get up to.

South Bay Scuba, founded in 2013, is Branch 2516 of the British Sub Aqua Club.

Anyone joining our club also joins BSAC and can then access all of the BSAC training and events.

You can learn to dive, to drive a boat, to operate a compressor, and develop your first aid skills to include oxygen administration and diver rescue.

There are currently 62 club members in the diving, snorkelling and social categories.

This includes 20 qualified instructors.

Our club motto, which is incorporated into our logo, is Diving With Friends – and that is exactly what we aim to do.

Everyone is incredibly friendly and supportive, and we are always keen to welcome new members who then become our friends.

We have a lot of Yorkshire members based in Scarborough, Bridlington, York, Thirsk, Harrogate, Leeds, Otley, Driffield, and Doncaster.

Further afield, we have members in Teesside, Dronfield, Dundee, Fife, Aberdeen, London, and even the south of France!

Everyone is welcome.

Club nights take place at the Valley Pub on the first Thursday of every month and we have a very active Facebook group which we use to stay in touch in the surface intervals.

For special occasions such as Christmas or our annual summer Grand Day Out, we go to restaurants or else have a BBQ on the Regal Lady, which is owned by one of our club members.

We welcome experienced divers, new divers, people who want to give it a go, and people who might have dived on holiday but want to try diving in the UK.

Although we provide BSAC training in-house, many of our members have crossed-over from other dive agencies including PADI and SSI.

This winter, we will be running training sessions for qualified PADI Open Water divers who are crossing over onto the BSAC Sports Diver syllabus.

There are some great inland sites which are accessible from Scarborough, including Capernwray in Lancashire, Stoney Cove in Leicestershire, and Eight Acre Lake and Blue Lagoon which are both closer, but are smaller and shallower than either Capernwray or Stoney Cove.

We have some excellent club instructors who are patient and experienced and know just how to get the best progress out of divers.

We are an active club and we enjoy getting involved in local projects including citizen science projects, such as Seasearch, and marine archaeology projects including surveys of local wreck sites – there are lots of great places to dive up and down the Yorkshire coast!

The sea on a windy, wintry day looks grey and cold but in the right conditions you might be very surprised at what can be seen only a few hundred metres off the coast.

On our annual Grand Day Out in August, we recorded over 60 species including seals, octopus, dogfish, lots of crabs and lobsters, cup corals, dahlia anemones, sea urchins, and lots of fish including cod, wrasse and dragonets.

We have two club boats and many of our members are trained to skipper them.

Our hardboat, Condor, is a 31ft Mitchell 31, carrying up to eight divers.

We were lucky enough to receive a £10,000 lottery grant to fund her purchase, added to a further £6,000 raised by club members so that she could be converted to a dive boat.

She has a galley, a toilet, a cabin, and a dive lift to make getting on and off the boat easy.

Condor is berthed in the Outer Harbour.

Booom (3 o’s) is a 5.7 metre RHIB with a 140 HP Suzuki 4 stroke engine.

She can carry 4-6 divers.

In the winter months, Booom is berthed at Largs in the west of Scotland, and members travel up one or two weekends a month to dive the shipwrecks and scenic sites of the Clyde.

The club calendar has lots of trips organised within the UK and beyond.

Favourites include the Sound of Mull, Cornwall, Scapa Flow, St Abbs and Dorset.

Beyond the UK, we have done trips to Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, and Norway.

In 2015, we won the BSAC Heinke Trophy.

To join, message our Facebook page or text/whatsapp Anne Morrison on 07877186996.