A few pictures from our recent trip to the Garvellachs. Words to follow.

Click image below to embiggen: -

Pictures courtesy of Kev and Mark.

After some dives with, ahem, less than ideal viz earlier in the season, the weather has been improving a bit recently and the viz with it. Charlotte gives us the low down on a recent Sunday’s diving: -

Catterline, Sunday 16th May 2010.

On Friday 14th the forecast wasn’t good, and by Saturday lunchtime numbers were still thin, but Roddy told us to meet for 11 am Sunday for a single dive. By 8.20 pm numbers had climbed to 13, with several more boat-handlers in the mix, and there was a good final turnout on Sunday morning with all three inflatables launched. Helen came along to watch and was given a lifejacket and a place in a boat and the whole party set out for Todhead; the novice party anchored in the bay while the orange boat went round the point. Visibility was excellent, for a change, at around 6-10 metres.

Stovies and Louise set off to swim the channel and join the party from the orange boat. Barrie and Charlie were next off the grey boats, swimming through the tunnel and then back against the current; they looked understandably weary by the time they climbed back into the boat. Roddy and Alex, Val and Charlotte dropped in next and after a controlled buoyant lift session swam with the current through the channel between the mainland and the island. What a buzz! Whisked past all sorts of wildlife, past the girder and horn of the old foghorn, we surfaced the seaward side of the island exhilarated and slightly breathless.

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Google’s brilliant Streetview has recently been updated to cover a lot of areas that had previously been left out. One of these is Catterline, our base for Wednesday evening/Sunday morning dives during the summer months. Given that british summer time is starting soon, it won’t be long until we’re back down there looking off the end of the pier to see what sort of viz lies in store for us. Looks like it was a fairly breezy day when the Google Streetview car visited :-

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The woeful lack of posts on the club website might lead you to believe that we never got wet in 2009, but that wasn’t the case at all. Well, some of us got wetter than others due to their new ‘dry suit’, but the less said about that the better. We had trips to all our usual haunts – Oban, Lochaline (The Sound of Mull), The Garvellachs, Ullapool, The Moray Coast as well as all our regular diving out of our HQ down at Catterline.

We had some (long overdue) beautiful weather for our trip to Glen Uig at the end of May. Check out the pictures in the previous post for the evidence. Most of us had nearly forgotten what it’s like to lie on the tubes of the rhib enjoying the sunshine in between dives, and that weekend certainly made up for it. Once again we enjoyed the hospitality of Fergie Macdonald and his family at the Clanranald Hotel and once again they outdid themselves, laying on live music for us in the bothy and making sure we were well fed and nobody went thirsty. In fact, we enjoyed it so much that this year’s trip is already booked.

At the end of June we had a weekend in Rosehearty. We were lucky again with the weather and had some great diving at Troup Head (gannet-tastic) amongst other places, with a stop over in Pennan for lunch on the way back of course! Roddy and Barrie had their annual dive somewhere in the vicinity (or not more likely!) of the Fram Bow and saw much the same as they saw last year. We had a couple of really nice dives at a site that was new to us, one with loads of caves and crevices which we have been back to explore again since and where we were lucky enough to see a few nosey seals and some guillemots fishing under the water, which is always pretty cool to watch. It’s somewhere we’ll no doubt be back to and I’ll post some more details on here at that time.

At the end of August a group of us headed over to Ullapool, hoping that our luck with the weather would continue and we’d get a chance to head out to the Summer Isles where we haven’t been in a few years now (August 2006 was the last time in fact). Unfortunately the weather gods didn’t smile on us this time and we had to reign in our ambition a bit and dive a bit closer to Ullapool. Nevertheless, we had some nice dives and the viz varied from really quite good, to practically zero for part of a very unusual dive we had on the Sunday. We had been diving the wreck of the Fairweather V on the Sunday morning (see the video clip below) and for our second dive we headed back closer to Isle Martin, had a lunch stop on the beach and then set out to dive under the cliffs on the mainland opposite the north side of the island. The colour of the water being churned up at the back of the rhibs was a murky brown colour and when the first pair of divers dropped in they came back to the surface and said the viz was practically nil. We hauled them back aboard and zipped across the water to attempt a dive on the north side of the island and when they disappeared beneath the water and didn’t return immediately the rest of us started to kit up wondering just how crap the dive was likely to be. Keeping close to our buddies we submerged into the peaty brown water and after descending slightly the water suddenly went clear and the viz was excellent. We all had a great dive and quite a few crayfish were spotted, which was an unusual but welcome sight on a dive these days. The heavy rain of previous days had left a layer of peat-stained fresh water run-off from the land sitting on the top of he seawater and barely mixing. It made for a pretty bizarre dive which was livened up further by an abundance of large lion’s main jellyfish that you had to avoid ending up wearing as a hat as you surfaced again!

Any way, here’s the Fairweather V, host to a unusually inquisitive pollock that day: -

Another club trip to Oban and a trip to Lochaline followed in September and October respectively and the good news from the Sound of Mull is that the sh*tty Shuna is no longer befitting of that name. This is a wreck that you were pretty much assured rubbish viz on due to it being in the vicinity of a fish farm. The fish farm has now packed up and left, the wreck is starting to benefit from its departure and I’m told an enjoyable dive was had by one and all! I’m looking forward to a visit this year hopefully to check it out for myself.

That brings us up to the 2009 Try Dives which took place on the 26th Oct and the 2nd Nov and were a great success. So much so that we have 11 trainees this year, which is great news for the club and it looks as though 2010 could be a bumper year of diving. Trips have already been announced to Oban and Glen Uig and have filled in no time. The club appears to be in rude health and fingers crossed the weather is nowhere near as extreme throughout the rest of the year as the start has been!

My new years resolution should really be to update the club website a bit more often, but with all these new divers joining the club I won’t really need to, will I ?!

Happy diving and all the best for 2010 from BSAC500!