A-Frames a frame for aw' that!

Sorry for the Burns reference, but we're nearing that time of year when we celebrate his poetry here in Scotland. This Thursday's dive (16th January) was at the A-Frames. For those of you that don't dive on the west coast of Scotland, this is midway along Loch Long at the Finnart oil terminal. Click here for the Finstrokes guide

As a dive site it can be prone to poor visibility and a small amount of boat traffic, but on the whole it's a great site where there is always something to see. It's much maligned by divers as boring, but it's actually a spectacular site and on a good day or night in my case there are few better dives in the Scottish fjords.

Laura and I chose this as the venue as a number of people were doing their first night dive with us (a unique mix of ScotSAC and PADI divers living in harmony). Add to that the fact I was test driving a new pony configuration then it's safe to say a familiar site is always a good thing in such cases.

Diving to around 20m to what we call the 'big frame'  we saw loads of great stuff including peacock worms, scorpion fish, pipe fish, and toad crabs along with all the usual West of Scotland stuff.

Five divers went into the water, five emerged safely. All enthused about the quality of the viz, the life and of course, my navigation of the group. ;)

For those interested, I swear by the reliability of my wrist mounted Suunto SK-7 compass - even when surrounded by ferrous metals! 40 bangers well spent in my view!

Toad Crab

Pretty Urchin on Frame

Peacock Worms

Scorpion Fish