Farne Way - 14/09/2017

It’s been a few years since I last dived at the Farnes. Sometimes you forget what it’s like. I mean, you remember the visuals, average diving, seals, the village of Seahouses, but I always forget just how playful and fun loving young seal are.

I was taking young Sarah in for her first taste of seal action. I explained the rule was to always let them come to you.

We did. They came, they posed for photos, they nibbled our fins, they tried to bite our fingers, they played with us. I think 

It genuinely has to be Farne away one of the best places on earth to dive with marine mammals.

The Poseidon's Parlour Seal of Approval - 26/09/2014

Yesterday I meandered down to the Farne Islands, England with Ace Divers. A few chums had been booked on the trip for quite sometime, but I heldoff until I saw the weather report. It's a risky approach in terms of availability, but I've never  regretted not being there when the weather is poor.

My buddy for the day was the Zookeeper, with the occassional appearance from Alky-Fras who was solo diving but hanging around us every so often.

If any of you have never been there before the Farne Islands are group of islands of the North East coast of England. In diving terms they are notable for two things:

• a selection of over 40 shipwrecks
• a colony of over 6,000 grey seals

Our diving for the day was focused on the seals.

I've dived here before on a couple of occassions and it was that I first met the Zookeeper last year. So I was pretty familiar with what was going to happen. :)  Due to tides, we dived the same spot twice but had quite different experiences.

The first dive averaged about 6m and it took us about 15 mintes before we had our first close encounter, but when it happened it happened in the usual style - fin nibbling. I was busy filming one nibbling the Zookeeper when I felt a tug on my own. I looked round to see two, one on each fin, like a pair of comedy seal skin slippers.

From then on in it was seal interaction gold. I was diving a 15l tank (thanks Campbell) so even after an hour underwater I still had 150 bar left!

After lunch and a cup of tea I was  ready for a more scenic dive, but most of the people wanted more seals - can you ever have enough?

The tide was in so the dive site had changed somewhat. Most people hung around the main seal entry exit point, but we went off on a wee adventure. We found some nice stuff too:

• an octopus
• a bloody henry or two
• millions of nudibranchs
• more seals
• loads of common lobsters
• squaties etc

Ahter my experimentation with macros last week I started trying to photograph the nudibranchs. As I did I felt a mouth round my head. Sadly, the Zookeepers camera battery had died, but it seems I was wearing a seal like a top hat. We stayed down for 58 minutes.

Nobody on the boat was seasick largely thanks to Stugeron.

The Zookeeper is excited

Scorpiofish 

Nudibranch

The Great Crab Grab - 13/03/2014

Twin Piers

Another day and another mission for Laura. this time it was crabs that were to be our quarry - small hermit, shore and velvet swimming crabs. The venue for this was a very tranquil Twin Piers, Loch Long.

As we were preparing the transportation tank before the dive we noticed two rather playful seals popping up and splashing around on the surface. Potentially, this could be a really fun dive.

Entering the water just as it got dark we descended to around 20m, only for me to think that we had missed the reef. However, it would seem that I had just gone a little deeper than usual because of the unusually low tide and so we were just on an unfamiliar part of the seabed. Still, Laura seemed to be having fun collecting crabs in her bag. After a quick detour we finally hit the mark.

Once on the reef we pottered around finding a rather nice pipefish, some large edible crabs a variety of small gobies and wrasse, but no sign of either of the seals that had frolicking on the surface.

As time went on we began our ascent to the surface doing a swimming safety stop. Once on the surface we were shocked that we had been down for 50 minutes (I still had 80 bar left in the tank). Since we'd went in other divers had entered, had a dive and dekitted. Unsurprisingly, my fingers were cold.

Since coming home I've done some calculations and I've achieved my second lowest air consumption ever - 18.9 litres per minute. That's only the second time I've dipped below 19lpm. Happy days!

I never took much by the way of pictures, but below are the two that I liked - a crab eating what looked like a cloaked hermit crab and the pipefish, but they only serve to highlight that I need to either replace my strobe or get a new light for photography as my torch has too focused a beam.

Crab eating crab

Pipefish