A visit to Oban at the beginning of May has traditionally been the club’s first trip of the season where the novices get an opportunity to experience some diving on the West coast. We’ve been a bit unlucky with the weather the past two years, but this year the weather gods took pity on us and we had lots of lovely sunshine! Our new resident wordsmith Charlotte gives her impression of Oban 2010 :-

Oban club trip, May 7-9 2010 – a novice’s view

I reached Puffin with Colin Cunningham on Friday afternoon, just as the boat was unloading all the lucky people who’d gone down on Thursday evening. Barry, Roddy, Val and Kev kindly piled their kit back into the boat while we changed and grabbed our stuff from the car, and we set off to Heather Island and my first experience of good viz. Well, any viz, really. We spent an entrancing 25 minutes or so diving the west side of the island; Kev looked for scallops and I just looked. I’ve never thought of seaweed as beautiful before, but then I’ve only ever seen it lying about on the beach. I did take my mask off and put it back on – it had to be done sometime – but mainly I just looked around and marvelled.

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Some photos from our recent club trip to Glen Uig. Thanks to Maggie, our trip photographer. Full story to follow soon!

On our (not so) recent club trip to Kyle of Lochalsh we were treated to some of the wildest weather that Scotland has to offer. Given our track record over recent years you’d have to question our decision to make Kyle the location for our last club dive trip of the year and this year was certainly no exception! It was wild, wild, wild. So much so that on the Saturday it just wasn’t safe to set to sea and we had to make do with a day trip onto Skye for a bit of sight-seeing. Unlike a previous rather embarrassing episode in the history of the club where we were weathered out in Oban, we didn’t resort to stopping somewhere for a nice cup of tea and a chat. Instead, we watched Alan get all Japanese tourist (photographic evidence below) with the spectacular weather and then had a pint in Portree.

It came as a bit of a shock to realise that it had been over two years since the club had last dived at St Abbs, in addition there was a growing number of members who had never dived off a hard boat. Time to sort!

We all headed down on the Saturday morning and for the first time in a very long time we actually got a weekend with great weather – what a difference it makes.

We were diving with Paul O’Callaghan off the Lazy G’diver. First dive was one called Anemone Reef which certainly lived up to its name with a huge number of large dahlia anemones of a wide range of colours from white through to dark purples. One yellow one stood out as a colour I had never seen as bright as that before (see photos). There were also some lovely walls covered in life and a good range of fish, including the ever present Ballan wrasse looking for a free meal! Most people also saw the wolfish that St Abbs is famous for. At the end of a gentle drift along this lovely site, Paul was waiting to pick us up and supply the very welcome coffee and biscuits!

After a leisurely lunch back on shore at the newer of the two cafes that are there – great freshly made soup – there was just time for a short nap in the sun before heading off for our second dive. This one was slightly nearer the harbour but provided a lovely dive with lots of gullies and overhangs to explore, with probably even more fish around and on a different terrain to the morning dive without the anemones.

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