Diving on Dead Chest near Peter Islands (2) BVIs

Bright red and orange corals like those we had seen
on the Painted Walls dive the previous day

On Thursday 6 January, with everyone anchored in Deadman Bay, we were able to start diving earlier and so planned to do 2 dives but try to achieve them with just one air tank.  The first was Dead Chest Wall.  As the name suggests, there is a wall here, but we also scouted around the rocks at the floor of the wall as there was a lot to see there too.

In a deep crack in the rock we saw a long spined sea urchin and beside it a shrimp with long claws; perhaps a cleaner shrimp.  Whilst down on the seabed we also saw another porcupinefish.

Right: An unhappy lobster shooting off and (left) continuing to swim away backwards to escape

Hiding under a shelf there were a couple of lobsters but I’m sad to say that 2 of our group disturbed them resulting in one of the lobsters shooting of backwards rather dramatically to get away.  Dead Chest is in a marine park and a No Take Zone so, tempting as it might have been to have a lobster for dinner, these ones were for photographing only.

A happier lobster watching us swim past

Gossiping at the 6 metre safety stop?

We spent just 42 mins on that first dive and only went down to 13m so when we surfaced we all agreed we had sufficient air for a second dive.  But, rather than going straight into it, we returned to the yachts for a lunch break which allowed us to warm up a bit and gave some time for our nitrogen levels to drop.

Our plan to use one tank split between 2 dives relied upon our having a shallow second dive and so we had picked one out at the top end of Dead Chest.  It’s known by 2 names: Coral Gardens or Dead Chest North and it looked to be only about 9 metres deep; perfect for what we needed.

There was a lot to see.  Interesting corals and lots of fish.  Also, because of the dive being shallow, we benefitted from seeing the colours which are washed out to greys and blues when diving deeper.

Diving in a big group does have the disadvantage of not necessarily progressing at speed you want to. However, with so many eyes looking out, you do have the advantage of perhaps seeing some extra things that you might otherwise have missed.

Even though we were still using the same air tank as the morning, the shallow 9 metre depth meant that we were actually submerged for 48 mins, by which point I was starting to feel the cold and so was quite pleased to be going back up.

It had been a final good day of diving in a week of great dives.  But all good things must come to an end and we had agreed to go our separate ways the next day, with some poor weather forecast to arrive a day or so later.  Innamorata II, Wild Iris and Endless Summer were all close to the end of their visa time in the BVIs, whereas we had decided that we would stay in the BVIs rather than go through the faff of checking in to the USVIs.  So we had a final evening together, this time on board Wild Iris, and said our goodbyes.

Peter Island and Dead Chest, British Virgin Islands