Return to Normal - 29/10/2018

Me photographing the cuttlefish below.

After training dives, a trip overseas and a wee break. I returned to my normal night diving routine with Jester as a barely tolerable buddy. We kitted up wondering where exactly the loch was. As it was, it turned out it was low tide and I mean Barry White low tide.

We meandered down planning to dive to the small speedboat then to the bottom of the reef (taking advantage of the shallower depths) and back up. It was a pretty

Everything went to plan with loads of cuttlefish, pipefish, gurnards, scorpion fish and only a small amount deco that was worked off before we even got to the ceiling.

It was thoroughly pleasant way to spend 62 minutes, an experience only added to by the glow of the Milky Way above us as we emerged from the water.

Short Spinned Sea Scorpion

The cuttlefish I was photographing

Greater Pipefish

Gurnard

Hull of Kintyre - 08/09/2018

I have friends who consider me a depth junkie. I'm really not, but some of the best dives require deep training and a fair bit of commitment. Some time ago when chatting in the pub I had mentioned that the wreck of the SS Kintyre was one of my dive highlights. The Barrman was enthused. He wanted to dive it there and then. Shiny also decided it was special enough to lure him in for a dive.

I promised to keep my eyes peeled for suitable dates. In the end we plumped for Saturday 8th September. High tide was 12.16pm. As such if we entered the water at around 11.15am  we'd nail the tides. The weather forecast looked promising. It all came together as it had once before for Jester and I the previous year.

I was buddying Shiny, the Barrman was with the Wylie Fox and we were joined by one half of Das McLetchies and his buddy John. 

Shiny is always slow at kitting up. I mean, painfully slow. Although, he'll point  out that it means that he has everything just right. And he did, but it meant that we were last in the water and at the back of the queue.

We never saw the rest of the divers disappear down the pipe. Instead, we made our own way down and onto the wreck. Both qualified beyond recreational limits, we headed for the stern and ended up recording 49m. It was a pretty relaxed affair, but made me realise the best bit of the wreck is 40m on the deck. On the way back up along the famous jobby pipe we met the other divers. I was asked if we'd been to the boat. I signalled the affirmative. The rest, it seems, hadn't found it. I never said much about it the dive - nobody wants to be "that guy".

Scapa Flow Day 7 - The Junkyard of Orkney - 15/06/2018

The last day of our trip to Scapa Flow was to provide us with a brilliant ending. We were repeating a dive on the SMS Konig then we were heading to one of the debris fields (SMS Seydlitz . I wasn’t sure about doing a debris field, but the two Flying Dutchmen on the boat zwere super keen and, well, we’d bullied them into doing all the sites we wanted. It seemed only fair.

The Konig was fairly uneventful, but the debris field was spectacular in terms of small life. I genuinely loved it. 

There were loads of nudibranchs, a baby shark, a sea mouse and a whole host of little macropodia rostrata, but surprisingly little debris. 😀