Eccleston Quarry is a mile south of Eccleston, Lancashire. It is also called Eccleston Delph and Eccy Delph (pronounced "ekky"). It is an old stone quarry that flooded. It is a popular site for scuba diving. Visibility is generally very poor and ropes have been strung between each underwater 'feature' to aid navigation, since traditional compass methods are all but impossible in the murky waters. Much work has been undertaken to improve visibility in the recent past, and by 2010 the visibility was much improved.
Formerly a Mr. Hurst ran it as a stone quarry and employed 12 men. From it came stone for BlackpoolPromenade, and thin split stone used as slates for roofing in the area. It was formerly also called Hurst House Delph and Marsden's Quarry.
A local resident said that "during World War II a Ministry paid a local man to run at intervals a pump to keep the quarry empty while its owner and staff were away. After the war due to official reorganization they stopped paying the local man, who therefore stopped running the pump, and over time the quarry flooded."[citation needed]
After it was abandoned and allowed to flood by ground water seeping in, it was an unofficial scuba diving site for a long time. The back of the quarry was cliff standing straight out of the water, and there were no buildings except a stone hut near the entrance, and a machinery shed which was submerged when the quarry flooded. Over the years the shed's sheet-metal walls and roof rusted away, leaving its metal skeleton.
On 14 October 1979 the handless body of narcotics dealer Marty Johnstone ("Mr Asia") was discovered in the quarry by local divers. Johnstone had been murdered on the orders of his associate Terry Clark ("Mr Big"). The discovery led to an international police investigation and the breakup of the "Mr Asia" narcotics gang.
Around the year 2000 it was pumped dry, and over 250 cars and much rubbish were removed from it, and it was landscaped, and re-flooded, and scuba diving centre buildings built by it, and objects were submerged for divers to dive on.
Facilities
The Delph has a cafe, shop, changing facilities, swimming pool, training room, equipment hire and an air filling station.
There are many entry and exit points including shore entry with concrete slipways, sturdy steel deep entry points with fin friendly steps. Most have railings with chain linkages.
Underwater features
There are many things for divers to explore including speedboats, a Jet Provost, armoured personnel carriers, a light tank, containers, a concrete tube, and a gnome garden, and a playground. As well as these there are training platforms at various depths from 3m to 9m. All are marked by surface buoys.
Underwater life
The Delph is well stocked with a large variety of fish including koi carp: bags of food can be bought to feed the fish. Angling is not allowed there.
Filming
A Coronation Street episode where a car nearly fell into water but was stopped by bushes, was filmed there.
In underwater diving, open water is unrestricted water such as a sea, lake or flooded quarries. It is the opposite of confined water (diving) where diver training takes place. Open water also means the diver has direct vertical access to the surface of the water in contact with the Earth's atmosphere. Open water diving implies that if a problem arises, the diver can directly ascend vertically to the atmosphere to breathe air. Penetration diving—involving entering caves or wrecks, or diving under ice—is therefore not "open water diving". In some contexts the lack of a decompression obligation is considered a necessary condition for classification of a dive as an open water dive, but this does not affect the classification of the venue as open water.
Technical diving is scuba diving that exceeds the agency-specified limits of recreational diving for non-professional purposes. Technical diving may expose the diver to hazards beyond those normally associated with recreational diving, and to a greater risk of serious injury or death. The risk may be reduced by appropriate skills, knowledge and experience, and by using suitable equipment and procedures. The skills may be developed through appropriate specialised training and experience. The equipment often involves breathing gases other than air or standard nitrox mixtures, and multiple gas sources.
Cave diving is underwater diving in water-filled caves. It may be done as an extreme sport, a way of exploring flooded caves for scientific investigation, or for the search for and recovery of divers lost while diving for one of these reasons. The equipment used varies depending on the circumstances, and ranges from breath hold to surface supplied, but almost all cave diving is done using scuba equipment, often in specialised configurations with redundancies such as sidemount or backmounted twinset. Recreational cave diving is generally considered to be a type of technical diving due to the lack of a free surface during large parts of the dive, and often involves planned decompression stops.
Recreational diver training is the process of developing knowledge and understanding of the basic principles, and the skills and procedures for the use of scuba equipment so that the diver is able to dive for recreational purposes with acceptable risk using the type of equipment and in similar conditions to those experienced during training.
Recreational diving or sport diving is diving for the purpose of leisure and enjoyment, usually when using scuba equipment. The term "recreational diving" may also be used in contradistinction to "technical diving", a more demanding aspect of recreational diving which requires greater levels of training, experience and equipment to compensate for the more hazardous conditions associated with the disciplines. Breath-hold diving for recreation also fits into the broader scope of the term, but this article covers the commonly used meaning of scuba diving for recreational purposes, where the diver is not constrained from making a direct near-vertical ascent to the surface at any point during the dive, and risk is considered low.
Police diving is a branch of professional diving carried out by police services. Police divers are usually sworn police officers, and may either be employed full-time as divers or as general water police officers, or be volunteers who usually serve in other units but are called in if their diving services are required.
Defenses against swimmer incursions are security methods developed to protect watercraft, ports and installations, and other sensitive resources in or near vulnerable waterways from potential threats or intrusions by swimmers or scuba divers.
Stoney Cove is a large flooded quarry which is a popular inland scuba diving site, located between Stoney Stanton and Sapcote in Leicestershire, England.
Henry Albert Fleuss was a pioneering diving engineer, and Master Diver for Siebe, Gorman & Co. of London.
Wazee Lake is a lake east of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in the town of Brockway, Jackson County, Wisconsin, United States. The name "Wazee" means "tall pine" in the Ho-Chunk language. The artificial lake is the deepest lake within the state of Wisconsin, with a maximum depth of approximately 355 feet (108 m). The man-made lake was formed after the site was used as a quarry for taconite mining between the mid-1960s through April 1983. The quarry produced about 850,000 tons of taconite pellets each year. The mine closed in 1983 as a result of a crash of the domestic steel markets in the United States. When the mine was in operation, pumps removed about 800 US gallons of water per minute from the quarry. Once these pumps were shut down, the quarry began filling with water.
MS Zenobia was a Swedish-built Challenger-class RO-RO ferry launched in 1979 that capsized and sank in the Mediterranean Sea, close to Larnaca, Cyprus, in June 1980 on her maiden voyage. She now rests on her port side in approximately 42 meters (138 ft) of water and was named by The Times, and many others, as one of the top ten wreck diving sites in the world.
The Portland Brownstone Quarries are a set of historic quarries in Portland, Connecticut. The brownstone mined from these quarries was an important source for construction in the latter half of the 19th century. The stone from these quarries was used in a number of landmark buildings in Chicago, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New Haven, Connecticut, and Hartford. The site was listed as a National Historic Landmark, which also placed it on the National Register of Historic Places, on May 16, 2000.
Dutch Springs is a spring-fed lake located north of the city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the United States. Since 1980, a commercial recreation area, with facilities for scuba diving, has operated at the location. Dutch Springs is currently planning on selling the property to a Warehouse company and it is expected to close operations. An official date hasn't been set but comments from the manager suggest it may be as early as January 2022.
A silt out or silt-out is a situation when underwater visibility is rapidly reduced to functional zero by disturbing fine particulate deposits on the bottom or other solid surfaces. This can happen in scuba and surface supplied diving, or in ROV and submersible operations, and is a more serious hazard for scuba diving in penetration situations where the route to the surface may be obscured.
Dorothea quarry is a disused slate quarry in the Nantlle Valley area in North Wales. It covers a large area near the village of Talysarn and contains three flooded deep lakes.
Recreational dive sites are specific places that recreational scuba divers go to enjoy the underwater environment or for training purposes. They include technical diving sites beyond the range generally accepted for recreational diving. In this context all diving done for recreational purposes is included. Professional diving tends to be done where the job is, and with the exception of diver training and leading groups of recreational divers, does not generally occur at specific sites chosen for their easy access, pleasant conditions or interesting features.
Scuba skills are skills required to dive safely using self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Most of these skills are relevant to both open-circuit scuba and rebreather scuba, and many are also relevant to surface-supplied diving. Certain scuba skills, which are critical to divers' safety, may require more practice than is provided during standard recreational training.
Dive leader is the title of an internationally recognised recreational diving certification. The training standard describes the minimum requirements for dive leader training and certification for recreational scuba divers in international standard ISO 24801-3 and the equivalent European Standard EN 14153-3. Various organizations offer training that meets the requirements of the dive leader standard. Some agencies use the title "Dive Leader" for their equivalent certification, but several other titles are also used, "Divemaster" may be the most widespread, but "Dive Supervisor" is also used, and should not be confused with the very different status and responsibilities of a professional diving supervisor. CMAS affiliates certifications which meet the requirements of CMAS 3-star diver should meet the standard by default. The occupation of a dive leader is also known as "dive guide", and is a specialist application of a "tour guide".
Diving procedures are standardised methods of doing things that are commonly useful while diving that are known to work effectively and acceptably safely. Due to the inherent risks of the environment and the necessity to operate the equipment correctly, both under normal conditions and during incidents where failure to respond appropriately and quickly can have fatal consequences, a set of standard procedures are used in preparation of the equipment, preparation to dive, during the dive if all goes according to plan, after the dive, and in the event of a reasonably foreseeable contingency. Standard procedures are not necessarily the only courses of action that produce a satisfactory outcome, but they are generally those procedures that experiment and experience show to work well and reliably in response to given circumstances. All formal diver training is based on the learning of standard skills and procedures, and in many cases the over-learning of the skills until the procedures can be performed without hesitation even when distracting circumstances exist. Where reasonably practicable, checklists may be used to ensure that preparatory and maintenance procedures are carried out in the correct sequence and that no steps are inadvertently omitted.
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