Four Minus One

Despite the stong winds and the patchy weather, the diving was still stonking , despite muppets turning up late and taking 45 minutes to actually get on the boat and get sorted. And without even an apology for keeping us waiting. Still, we had the last laugh as quite a few of them were decidedly green after the boat ride out the the Skellies, so karma was definately in effect today.

It's also worth mentioning Elaine decided to bail out at the last minute, some nonsense about having to pack for her holidays to Cyprus.You would think holidays are more important than going diving. The nerve of the woman!! :-P

Looks can be deceiving. Rock and roll all the way.

Skellies gullies where still as vibrant as ever despite the lateness of the year and the lobster army was still ever present and scuttling about. With a multitude of flounders, scorpionfish and shrimp covering the walls and bottom, we weren't short of things to see, thats for sure.

Plenty of flatties in the gullies

Vis averaged 6-7m all day, which isn't the worst we've seen by a long shot but not the best either, but considering it wasn't the calmest of days, I'm not going to complain. We ran up and down a couple of the gullies and then drifted off SW to the shallows, onto the back of Hurker for our pick up before motoring back to harbour for the trational bacon butties.

Oh, and it's also worth mentioning that they have finally got round to fixing the potholes on the road down to the harbour. Which is nice.

Given the weather, dive sites were a bit restricted so we opted for Black Carr. No surprise there. Never a bad dive, etc, etc...

Lovely little scorpionfish in unusual colouring

  Tide was in flood so Peter dropped us further North on the frontside. This gave us plenty of opportunity to get some quality time in amongst the pinnacles and swim thoughs. This is one of the best dives I've had here and I found a couple of new swim throughs and overhangs (new to me) which were spectacular and just covered in dead mens fingers, anemones and nudibranchs. 

We swam through one crevice to end up in amongst a massive shoal of pollock which was spectacular and Mabs made a great find of a conger of truly epic proportion. As I've said before, you don't see many congers at St Abbs and this was a whopper. And wasn't shy either. I think Mabs was getting to ready to swim for it before it got hold of her and dragged into the depths!

Lobsters to the left of me, lobsters to the right....

And scooting past the anchor, we found several of the wolfies in their usual holes along with a juvenile wolfie who was a little shyer than the rest and wasn't keen to come out. Next time. Conditions at the surface were still on the crappy side and getting pretty lumpy, but fortunately we managed to get unloaded and in the car before the torrential rain hit us. Great weather for ducks.

It's about this time that the place starts to wind down for a lot of people. Peter, Paul and the rest still have a few more bookings for next month but after that, it's fairly spotty. But we'll be there as usual, all through Winter (weather permitting) and out the otherside. Roll on Summer time......