Friday 30 December 2016

Christmas Came Early - 21/12/2016


A conversation in Aquatron about Frocktasia not ever having seen a cuttlefish led to her and Mad Marx joining Jester and I on some St Catherines' night diving to find ourselves our target.

With Jester working late and the rest of us finishing early we headed up and did sneaky dive before Jester arrived. It was nice enough, but cuttlefish or bobtail squid as they are called in other parts of the world were conspicuous by their absence. My reputation as a cuttlefish wrangler was in tatters.


We emerged and re-tanked and went down again with Jester in tow. Then it happened, I was just swimming down past 10m when I spotted one crouched behind a rock. I signalled and we stayed and admired this stunning little creature for a bit before heading off to enjoy the rest of the site at night.

For Frocktasia it was another diving experience checked off. For me it was two of my lowest ever SAC rate - 12l/m.

Wednesday 21 December 2016

Hunter Gatherers -17/12/2016

With the amateur football season currently in a hiatus, I took the opportunity to dive with the Something for the Weekend crew, who this week were diving at much more civilised hour that encouraged my participation.

We did a couple of dives at the A-Frames, Finnart. Our group consisted of Cptn Al, legendary underwater photographer and proprietor of Bridge of Weir's finest restaurant Shafiq, the Walkman and a relative scubie-newbie Hunter - not the star of 90s tv show Gladiators.

We plunged into the icy cold diving in Red Arrow formation. The vis was pretty decent but, the life was a little limited and reminded me why dark is best. After a fairly lengthy potter at 20m we got the cold signal from one of the divers. It was cold to be fair - 7c.

On the way up it went a little wrong when Shafiq lost one of his dive computers. That meant that after a short surface interval our second dive was ultimately to become a failed search and rescue mission. 

We had fun and I managed to squeeze two dives out of one tank which saved me a few bucks. So that's my win for the day. As for our scub-newb it turns out he was pretty proficient  and has dived years ago and had just returned to it saying he was a beginner. So not really a newb at all.

The camera is still out of action.