I suspect that if there were a survey of where divers from the southern half of England made their first sea dive, Swanage Pier would come out top. Just visit the pier on any weekend, summer or winter, and you will see the regular vans from dive schools parked in their usual places. In-between there will be cars and vans from BSAC clubs taking batches of budding club divers on their first dives.
Swanage Pier is also a good place to take beginners from an instructors point of view. A nice shallow dive in a constrained and protected area with lots of stuff to see, with the added advantage that instructors can be bribed with a shuttle out to the Kyarra with Titch, in between taking trainees under the pier. Everyone is happy and the instructors don't need to miss a serious dive in order to help with a training day.
Under the shade of the pier, the usual shallow water plant life is eliminated and the legs of the pier are colonised almost exclusively by animal life: anemones, hydroids, bryozoans and tunicates.
Another attraction is wreckage, bits of junk between the pier legs ranging from decayed pier structure to old tyres once used as fenders for boats and even complete park benches.
Even with anglers regularly casting their lines from the deck above, there are still lots of fish beneath the pier. The anglers are most likely after the small pollack and bream that hang out there, and maybe the occasional oddity like a John Dory.
There are also many fish that are just not of interest to anglers, ranging from small topknots and scorpionfish to the ever smiling tompot blennies. Look carefully and you may even find such a rarity as a black faced blenny.
It's a fair swim to the end of the pier, 196 metres past 45 rows of wooden piles. The grid arrangement of the piles makes it an excellent dive for the navigationally challenged. The only complications are a couple of turns the pier makes on the way out and the wider sections for boarding boats.
Over the last few years, most of my dives under Swanage pier have been while teaching photography courses. Shallow water with lots to see provides an ideal location where students can concentrate on photography without being challenged by the diving conditions. There are pier legs and wreckage for wide angle shots with divers, and lots of small stuff for macro work.
Even the anglers come in useful. On one dive we were halfway along the pier before I found a macro lens was not engaging correctly. Rather than swim back, I tied my kit to a pier leg and climbed a ladder to the deck. An angler kindly lent me a fish-gut stained tea towel to dry my hands and the camera housing so I could open it and sort the problem out.
There is a charge for parking on the pier and for diving. In some locations I begrudge such charges, but not at Swanage where I have seen the enormous amount of restoration work that divers have helped to fund.
Restoration of the pier is an ongoing activity, with piles being surveyed and splinted or replaced to prevent the pier falling into disrepair again. Chief enemy is the gribble worm which eats its way through the timbers, though you won't see them while diving. The 2000 survey found a number of piles that required replacing and reported that “the gribble worm seem to be very hungry”.