Cathedral Worship

Well another quality days diving yesterday, with the site packed with divers. Lenny even kindly gave up his space to let us park at at the front of the harbour. Wonders never cease! We were down one of the regular crew, but we gained a rather nice chap for Manchester, also called Simon, who was joining us for some diving. Funny how all the best looking, handsome men are called Simon? 

Simon investigates Black Carr in more detail

Tide and conditions were with us, so we jumped in on the back of Big Black Carr. Seeing as we had a special request to find wolfies, we had a better than average chance of seeing them here and we weren't disappointed! First one was just past the anchor, sitting out on the ledge, happy as you please and judging by the size and colouration, it was a quite a mature one. Quite rare to see them sitting out of their holes. Alas, didn't get any shots as I didn't want to scare it off before Simon saw it. And by this time it had decided to nip back into its hole anyway. 

Two in the hole, better than one in the hand. Or something like that....

But the boy done good by finding a few more wolfies, thereby popping his wolfish cherry, so to speak and we were blessed with numerous sightings of wolfies for the duration of the dive with the ever present backdrop of the splendour that is Black Carr, covered wall to wall in soft corals, plumose anemones and dead mens fingers. With the obligatory collection of ballan wrasse, ling, edible crabs, squat lobsters, sunstars, the list goes on. Never a bad dive on Black Carr as we say.

Pathfinder at rest with Black Carr in the distance

Gentling motoring over to the otherside of the harbour entrance we jumped in on Cathedral Rock by special request, and the vis had picked up a little bit, averaging abou 6-8m with a water temp of 14 degrees, which I must say is the warmest I've seen it there all year, so that was nice.

Simon peeks back through the top arch on Cathedral

We done a couple of laps through the bottom arch and nose into the top arch, with the colourful corals coming to life under lamp light and the ballan wrasse following in our wake. The side walls on the exit from the bottom arch are teaming with life and it's well worth taking a little time to give these a good look as you never know what you might find. 

Cathedral lobster, the nations choice of lobster

With low water soon to be upon us, we went with the current and had a nice drift out from the shallows picking up some of the nice rock formations and big shoals of pollock. On a good day with the right current you can get from Cathedral over the Ebb Carr (or vice versa, depending on the tide), but we didn't quite make it today as the direction of the current wasn't in our favour, but we did get some quality flighing time over the superb scenery.

Post dive fishing. Trying to catch Paul a new shirt

As usual, Mr O'Callaghan did a sterling job of catering to our dive site whims and tea essentials whilst wearing remnants of 1970's chinese take away wallpaper. He calls them Hawaiian shirts but I'm not convinced......