Early Days Brian Watts remembers - Brian was a founder member of the club and is still actively diving today.

Deny Booker eyes Brian's money.... The beer suggests that this might have been the inaugural meeting of the club.

The first meeting to form a club took place in the Railway Inn Ilfracombe just before Xmas 1959. A steering committee was formed and a BSAC branch No.86 was formed in Feb 1960. BSAC itself was formed in 1956. We had a lot to learn and soon we had a lot to teach other branches.

We started with 20 members - 10 locals and 10 from RAF Chivenor, some of whom had had a crash diving course with Capt Hampton of Dartmouth. We hired the old Ilfracombe salt water pool ands we were diving in the summer of 1960. We were diving with all sorts of motley gear - home made and ex govt. You could expect to gear up for about £20. Compressed air was supplied by BOC and decanted into our bottles. Small ones were nicknamed 'tadpoles' - large ones 'jumbo'.

We used the Holiday Inn (formerly the Ilfracombe Hotel - haunt of the Prince of Wales and Kronprinz Wilhelm in the 1890's - now demolished) as a clubhouse, and shore dived from Combe Martin to Hartland Quay and had sported 3 club holidays to the Scilly Isles by 1965.

In 1966 we decided that training in the summer was a waste of diving time so we dived in the summer and trained in the winter - 36 years later we still do the same!

Training session in 1971 - note the complete absence of women.

Seawolf negotiating Mortehoe Railway Bridge - sadly neither are with us any more.

In 1967 several members thought that diving safety and training was getting lax, we had also bought our first boat for club use for the sum of £110 - a 21ft steel ship's lifeboat with a chicken house thrown in. This meant we had to start working out boat diving rules - a whole new ball game. In truth the club was fighting for its life. I was treasurer at the time and had been so since 1960. I received a subscription from one A. Lamerton who wished to transfer from Torquay, and I was able to write back and say that he was the only paid up member.

At the 1968 AGM I was ill with pleurisy but had been asked if I would stand as DO. I accepted but only on condition that a club rule be passed that lifejackets were worn on all club dives. The meeting ended in uproar and the club split in two. The club carried on and we dived safely and adventurously, but also democratically because as DO I needed all the help I could get! We arranged committee meetings once a month and devised our first dive programme. Against all the forecasts it worked - we arranged barbeques and dances to raise money and soon had £6000 in the bank. There it stayed for about 4 years until a wayward treasurer transferred it to his own bank account. Luckily our chairman at the time was a large man with a black belt in judo - we got all the money back...

The next four years saw the discovery of 7 local wrecks including the Woolaway, George Lambe, Monte Moro and HMS Weazle.

1972 gave us a younger DO with a change of ideas - 'give me an inflatable and trailer' he said, and we can dive the West of England. For two years North Devon was virtually forgotten and we dived Hope Cove, The Lizard, Lands End... In 1974 the DO set a dive programme to go to Cornwall at Easter, Whitsun and October and to dive locally in June July and August. This set the pattern for the next 25 years. In '74 the club met in the Pier Hotel overlooking the harbour and we had a compressor in a shed at the back - with the car park nearby it was an ideal arrangement --- except for the pub landlords and eventually we had a major row and walked out lock stock and compressor.

We clocked up quite a few adventures and quite a few firsts - first club with the ABLJ rule, first with the SMB rule and one of the first with a dive programme. We recovered a propellor from a Wellington bomber, two cannon and countless watches, false teeth, lobster pots and trawls. In those pre HSE days were allowed to 'work' - for SWEB laying cables across the Torridge, a gas pipe across the Yeo and recovered a body from under Ilfracombe pier. Members dived as far a field as Malta, Lanzarote, The Red Sea, Sudan, St Lucia, Andros, Maldives, Cayman, Australia and Antarctica. We trained about 350 divers, among them people from Iran, Finland, Norway, Canada, Germany and several from heathen lands north of Birmingham.

The cover of 'Triton' the BSAC house magazine May-June 1960.		An advert from 'Triton' - she would certainly have been accepted for training ... --------------- Log entry for the recovery of Mr Lister's watch.