With the Mermaid camping with JoeLe up on Loch Linnhe, the Zoekeeper and I decided to trundle up and join them for a dive on the Kentallan Wall. Loch Linnhe itself forms part of the Scotland's Great Glen fault line and the wall is part of a deep canyon that seems to run up the fault line.
We met up at the campsite and headed to the entry at the
Holly Tree Hotel. Where the water was calm and the tide was on a gentle flood. We spent some time constructing ridiculous fourway selfies before finally kitting up and entering the water.
Straight away JoeLe was having some difficulty so he abandoned the dive, but the three of us continued out. Surface swimming about 40m from the end of the pier to the point where the bottom was beginning to disappear. At that point we dropped in over 10m of water and continued the swim to the wall underwater. After a further swim we got to the edge.
Before choosing to tumble down the verticle drop our first significant find was a large Janolus Cristatus - the crystal tipped nudibranch. It's quite spectacular - the Cristal of nudibranchs.
Dropping further we found more, a large conger, saw lots of large fish, sunstars etc. However, the main draw has to be the topography. I've heard a lot of talk about diving the fault line Iceland, but here I was swimming along the very same thing right here in Scotland. And the visibility was superb! It was easily 15m, perhaps more!
We returned to shore entirely underwater and surfaced to be greeted by a variety of people. We dekitted and headed into the Holly Tree for a quite delicious meal - which included my first taste of oysters. My review can be read on
yelp if you are really interested, but given they provide you with the parking it seems only right that they benefit from divers custom.
After lunch we headed to the Slates for an easy second. Which I'm glad of. For the second time I got up close and personal with the elusive male cuckoo wrasse,
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