It Was The Best of Dives, It Was The Worst of Dives Part 1 - 10/04/2014

Tonight's diving adventure was a tale of two dives.The first at St Catherine's, Loch Fyne was to be followed by a scramble back over to Twin Piers, Loch Long. This effectively meant our surface interval was also part of our return journey. In part, this was to allow Fast Ed to squeeze in two dives. The poor boy had a 6.30am start and was insisting he had to tucked up in bed with Bella Swan by 11.30pm. I was off the next day and Laura didn't have to start work until after 10 so neither of us were particularly fussed about what time we got back to Glasgow.

As it is, we got to St Cat's and kitted up and entered the water in daylight at around 7.30pm. Before going in we encountered the guys from Evolution Divers, with whom we've shared a few dive sites in recent weeks. Entering as they exited the water, they informed us of great visibility of around 8-10m at various depths - good times!

Ellen the Eel

We entered and hit the reef at about 20m. I was keen to find a conger eel that Laura and I had found on our last trip there (So Much Nature Part 1). My memory and blog suggested we had found it at about 23m, but Laura's (dodgy) memory reckoned it was a good bit shallower so I lead us back up along the reef's edge to 15m, before turning back and heading deeper. Just as I hit 23m, I saw Ed flashing his torch a few metres back at 21m - he'd found it! So there we have it, if we took an average of both Laura and I's estimates we'd have found it straight away. There's a lesson there I'm sure.

After spending a bit of time with Ellen the Eel, we worked our way around the reef spotting various bits and bobs. The star of the show was an unusually shallow Nephrops Norvegicus, also known as the Norwegian lobster, Dublin Bay Prawn, Langoustine or Scampi.
Forty two minutes after entering the water we raced up the beach, switched tanks and threw the assembled kit in the back of the car and drove drysuit clad back to Loch Long....

Langoustine