There is something about lighthouses that jumps out and screams “dive me”. The more remote the light house, the louder the scream. At 8 miles into the Atlantic from Land's End, the scream from Wolf Rock is hard to ignore.There is something about lighthouses that jumps out and screams “dive me”. The more remote the light house, the louder the scream. At 8 miles into the Atlantic from Land's End, the scream from Wolf Rock is hard to ignore.
With the rock sticking up in the middle of nowhere, it is easy to see why they built a lighthouse on top of it. It must have been a major hazard to shipping. Funny thing is that I have never seen any wreckage when diving it. Presumably any ship that struck the reef was subsequently swept clear and sank in deeper water.
A steep wall descends from the rock, with the chart showing it going down as far as 70 metres. To the northeast the top of the wall is almost immediately under the lighthouse steps. On the other sides a reef slopes out to between 20 and 25 metres before the wall begins.
I have never found out when slack water is at Wolf Rock. It is more a case of when the conditions are good enough to get there, go anyway regardless of the state of the tide. With an obvious current running, there is no time to mess about on the surface. The boat runs in, engine in neutral, divers over the side and down to 10 metres as fast as possible. Only at 10 metres do I take time to settle down and locate my buddy, an easy task in the excellent visibility. Not the normal start to a dive, but in practice the only practical way to cope with such a dive site in a current and ground swell.
There is no bare rock, just a dense carpet of small and tough looking anemones of several different species and just about any colour I have ever seen anemones in. With a good 20 metres visibility the overall effect is stunning.
We follow a ledge deeper. At 45 metres the slope is still about 70 degrees and there is no sign of it levelling out. Having descended quickly to our agreed maximum depth, we start a more relaxed zigzag path back up. A typical computer dive profile.
It is much easier to look closely at the marine life whilst ascending. Now I realise that it is not just anemones on the wall, there are also patches of hydroids, a favourite food for nudibranchs. Some types of nudibranch are violently coloured and easy to spot. Others are incredibly well camouflaged and take a bit of close in searching to find. Obvious clues are tight spirals of white nudibranch eggs strung against the hydroids.
With the blue filtered light, the colours of the jewel anemones are deceptive. Under a strong dive light patches of deep purple come out a violent florescent pink and similar colour changes are visible in photographs.
Small edible crabs cling tight to cracks in the rock, but no larger crustaceans such as lobsters or crawfish. I guess it is just too exposed for them.
Various types of wrasse are everywhere, pecking away at the growth on the rocks and keeping a curious eye on the divers. Away from the rock a shoal of something streams past, but I have no idea what kind of fish they are. Just a mass of silvery grey with fins.
Our zigzag path carries us back below the lighthouse steps. We know where we are because there is a stream of miscellaneous junk scattered down the slope. Small bits of metal, steel pipe, one or two bottles. Just little scraps drooped from boats supplying the lighthouse over many years before it was automated.