What? Another trip to the Garvellachs, is that the only place that dive club ever goes to?

Well no, not exactly, but it does just happen to be the scene of some of the best dives we’ve had this year when the weather was actually good enough to go diving (bit of a sore point that)!

Friday night’s journey over was uneventful apart from some heavy rain in Perthshire on the way over. The sky started to clear as we headed westward and with the hours and hours of daylight available at the closest weekend to the longest day, the drive seemed that bit easier. The scenery is pretty spectacular, but the knowledge that there was a cold pint waiting at the Tigh-an-Truish on Seil meant that the view points weren’t over-utilized on the trip over!

Once our stuff was dropped off in the cottage, the door was locked and we headed over to the Oyster Brewery where we made polite chit chat about current affairs over a dry sherry or two. We all retired to bed early as we knew we had to be up the next day by good time. If anyone of the folk who were there remember a different sequence of events please let me know.

We were up by reasonable time on the Saturday morning and were faced with a pretty decent day considering the indecisiveness of the forecast in the run up to the weekend. Despite this, due to what can only really have been faffing combined with an unfortunate sandwich-based misunderstanding (of the kind where everyone’s on the boat and the sandwiches are in a cottage a mile and a half away!) it was after 11 by the time we set sail from Cuan to head out to the Garvellachs and our first dive site at the north end of Eileach an Naoimh.

When we dropped in on the first dive it was obvious that the viz was exceptionally good. Despite being good, there were a lot of ‘floaters’ hovering in it and on closer inspection a fair proportion of this seemed to be made up of immature comb and moon jellies amongst other things. There was a considerable fish presence compared to the last time we dived here, small shoals of tiny fish, cuckoo wrasse and saithe amongst other things as well as all the other life that usually adorns the walls on the western side of the Garvellachs here. With the light streaming down from the surface to 30 metres plus , everything was well illuminated apart from the beasties hiding in the crevices and our torches took care of that. It was actually possible to look up from 25-30m and see the sun glimmering on the surface of the water above us and I’d lost track of the last time I saw that! I took my camera along on the dive and took a couple of short video clips that I’ve stuck together and you can see the results below. I think the BBC camera men who shot Blue Planet can rest assured that their jobs are safe, but it gives you an idea of how good the viz was and what a nice dive site this really is!

After we’d all completed our dive the wind was starting to pick up a bit on the surface and push the RIB towards the rocks, making picking up divers a bit ‘interesting’! We had lunch on the RIB and headed north a bit to the bay on the East side of Garbh Eileach that marks the start of the other wall dive we had planned for the day. At this stage the forecast was suggesting that the weather would pick up further on the Sunday and so we’d decided that we should get the two favourite dive sites in that day in case we didn’t make it out the to the Garvellachs the following day.
Read the rest…

The club has been to Kyle many times before, in fact, it’s a bit of a tradition that the last official club trip of the year was to Kyle in November. However, as the last couple of times the weather has not been with us and knowing how good the Port Napier can actually be if the sun is shining through it, I decided to see if I could drag some of the rest of the club up to Skye with me when the weather should be more favourable!

We have stayed in a number of places over on Skye and on the mainland but on this occasion we stayed in the Kyleakin Youth Hostel.

Having made sure that I had booked the weather on this occasion, we all headed down to the slip at Kyleakin to launch the boat in beautiful sunshine. Worth watching tides here as it is not possible to launch at all states of tide, however, with the removal of the toll on the Skye Bridge, it is not a major thing to take the boat over to Kyle and launch there, which is in fact what we did on the Sunday morning.

The plan was to head down Loch Alsh in to Loch Duich and dive the big wall there and then head back and try a new site on the way back, so with boat loaded we headed off. This was the first time we had taken the club rib here but with the modifications now almost completed, we had no bother getting there.

The wall here can be done as a shore dive but is a real climb so the use of the boat is a much better idea. This is a great dive, with the wall dropping off vertically after you swim out from the shore across a fairly sandy slope. The wall has lots of life, with all the usual suspects but has a particularly impressive show of peacock worms (Sabella pavonia) with them being very abundant in some places on the wall. There were also decent numbers of fish with biggish shoals of saith kicking about, which was good to see as they had been few and far between on recent dives this year. For those of you who like myself, like walls this is a nice dive with some good bits of ‘proper’ vertical wall. There are also easier bits for those who did not feel so comfortable on the main wall and so this provides a real opportunity for a mix of divers to all be included.

After everyone was back safe, it was time to head for our lunch stop which turned out to be a rather nice spot with a bit of a view .

The afternoon dive was a site new to us that we had picked from the chart, what looked like a bit of a wall near Eilein Aoinidh point. This proved to be a nice dive with plenty of small fish about and some impressive Fireworks anemones (pachyerianthus multiplicatus) at the bottom of the wall. Not a huge wall but still a nice dive and you could have even collected some scallops if you’d wanted.

Read the rest…

The Summer dive season rolls on. With a very enjoyable trip to Kyleakin and more recently another successful trip to the Garvellachs (trip reports for both soon, honest!) now behind us, next up is Ullapool and the Summer Isles.

We visited the Summer Isles last year (‘06) and squeezed three dives into an overcast but warm and calm August day.

The Summer Isles make for a great day (or two or more if you get the weather!) of diving out of Ullapool. There are loads of dive sites to choose from, lots of life to see, often big shoals of fish and lots of nice places to stop over for your lunch (see above). Check the Google Map below to see where they are. You’ll have to click on the Satellite/Hybrid view button and then zoom out a bit as they seem to have disappeared off the Map view! Let’s hope they’re still there when we visit at the weekend.