Sometimes, on a clear night, it can seem as though you are living in perpetual twilight. This can be especially true on those evenings when the lochs are bathed in the "clair de lune".
Tonight saw the Kingmaker dive for the first time since he last dived with me on the El Minya in January 2016. In fact, his last coldwater dive was even further back in 2015. He chose St Catherine's as his site to do a nice tropical check dive. I say tropical - I mean, of course, baltic, but the poor chap didn't want to hear it. He stubbornly refused to believe that the water would be anything less than 13c. Oh well.
We kitted up, checked everything was in working order and headed in. The vis wasn't great but we eventually found the boat and made our way to the reef where we spotted a million nudibranchs. At one point I swam into a large cloud of silt that hadn't emanated from either of us. It made feel that we weren't alone in the water - I suspected a seal, a ninja seal.
As we emerged, Jester was waiting for to join us on the second dive. The Kingmaker was sufficiently cold by that time to know that he didn't to go again. The bellwether being the fact that when he slunk off for a pee he could barely find his 'chap' - a challenge at the best of times I'm told.
So off I went again, doing the same dive with Jester. Again we struggled to find the boat, but instead found the legendary St Cat's firework anemone. I reckon I could find it again too. Nudibranchs and butterfish were the order of the day yet again.
On this dive Jester too thought he spotted a seal in the distance and that was without me mentioning what I had seen on the first dive.
We emerged onto the beach with the loch bathed in moonlight. Had I not been with Jester and the Kingmaker it could have been quite romantic. It is, afterall, the season for it!
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