There was some deliberation during the planning stage of our holiday to Indonesia whether during our first week on Sulawesi it would be better to stay at a dive resort on the mainland or to stay on Bunaken Island itself. Having returned I can now say that we definitely made the right decision when we opted to stay on Bunaken Island. The scenery was spectacular and diving every day with Manado Tua (which looks for all the world like a mini-volcano) as a backdrop was certainly no hardship. Most days Manado Tua was even crowned with a little puff of cloud just to complete the effect. 🙂 Continue reading “‘Turtle City’, Bunaken Island, Sulawesi – July 2013”
Black Carrs, St. Abbs – July 2013
Black Carrs is a site that will be familiar to anyone who has dived at St. Abbs before. It’s a great place to see Atlantic Wolffish and when we visited here back in June we actually saw six of them on a single dive! We dived from Paul Crowe’s boat The Tiger Lilly again.
Continue reading “Black Carrs, St. Abbs – July 2013”
Skelly Hole, St. Abbs – July 2013
The St. Abbs VMR is a dependable spot for some nice, easy scenic diving and since Summer seemed to finally arrive at the start of July, seven of us decided to make the most of the great weather and booked spaces for the weekend on Paul Crowe’s boat the Tiger Lilly.
We dived West Hurker and Tye’s Tunnel (which I haven’t dived in years) on the Saturday and then started Sunday’s diving with a dive at Skelly Hole.
This isn’t a dive to be attempted on a day where there is any swell as the boat has to be maneuvered into a fairly tight spot to drop you off. It’s reasonably shallow too so any wave action would turn it into a fairly good approximation of a dive in a washing machine. Fortunately we had two warm days with reasonably light offshore winds and conditions were ideally suited to attempt this site.
El Cabron, Gran Canaria – December 2012
I was lucky enough to finish off my diving for the year in warmer waters than of late with some diving at El Cabron, Gran Canaria. At 20 degrees C, the water was a whole 10 degrees warmer than it was in the Clyde a couple of weeks ago when we were diving the wreck of the Akka amongst other things, but it was still good to be wearing a fairly thick wetsuit with hood!
As well as a nice little shoal of Bastard Grunt (that’s what they’re called, not a sudden bout of profanity), there was a lot of the usual life you see when diving around the Canaries. A Tiger Moray was hiding in a crevice, a cluster of Squid eggs were hanging from the underside of another and there were a pair of Cleaner Shrimps who had set up their cleaning station next to a Giant Anemone (there was no cleaning going on, possibly due to the Christmas holiday 😉 ) I also spotted a Canarian Lobster, which is a species endemic to the area but doesn’t bare too much of a resemblance to the Lobsters we are used to seeing whilst diving in the UK. Continue reading “El Cabron, Gran Canaria – December 2012”