A dull, drizzling morning developed into an afternoon of blue sky and blazing sunshine when we dived Rosehearty and Millshore recently. Contrary to the report we received from a surfacing diver, the visibility was actually very good (as can be seen from some of the photos). All the usual life was present and I even met my first Duck underwater whilst leading the group round the corner of one of the rocks at Millshore. I’m not sure which of the two of us got the bigger fright but the Duck decided to end his dive shortly afterwards! A Duck was preferable to the dead Badger that we met there last year, which has to be the oddest thing I’ve ever encountered on a dive. Having commented recently about how I didn’t think I had seen a Lumpsucker before, I saw the third one in as many weeks.
The Port Napier – June 2013
Despite the lack of updates to the blog I have in fact been doing a lot of diving in the past six months, honest! It was only after returning from a weekend on Skye that I downloaded my dive computer and discovered that a very enjoyable dive on the wreck of The Port Napier had actually been my 50th dive of 2013!
The Port Napier has to be one of the most well dived wrecks in Scotland and justifiably so. There isn’t much I can write about it that hasn’t already been covered several times over, but if you don’t know what sort of vessel The Port Napier was and the dramatic manner in which it came to be be where it is, you can find out more here, here and here for starters. Continue reading “The Port Napier – June 2013”
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”
Hin Musang “Shark Point” – Thailand 2007
Sorting through my hard drive I came across these pics of a dive at Shark Point in Thailand several years ago. I hand’t been diving for too long at the time and the dive included one of my first close up encounters with a shark. Continue reading “Hin Musang “Shark Point” – Thailand 2007″