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Trip Report - St Abbs 2008 |
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Five members woke up on Friday morning and gazed from the warmth of the bunkhouse kitchen to see the sea crashing over the harbour wall.
An alternative plan for the morning was hastily put together but it was not needed. Crash joined the party and soon the skipper of the dive boat Wave Dancer 2 appeared to tell us that he’d find a place to drop us for a dive.
The Team: Mark Jackson; Paul Crashley; Nick Kay; Mel Jackson; Nigel Markham; Derek Hornsby; Paul Hildreth; Sheila Carter; Sandra Longbone; Nick Bishop; Rob and Dex Pearson; Dare, Stewart and Nerys Hinchliffe; Shane Thackeray
Despite poor weather we managed to have a full three days of diving - six in total - all from the comfort of Billy Aitcheson’s catamaran.
I have dived the SS Odense in Petticowick Bay four times now but the Saturday morning dive was the best of the lot - good visibility and little current. It was good navigation practice with two separate sets of boilers to view and explore.
The conditions were suitable to introduce newly qualified divers to British sea conditions. Depths were seldom below 16m and there were gentle drift conditions on a couple of dives. We even managed to get Shane a wall dive on Sunday morning after visiting a sea cave off St Abbs Head.
Not unexpectedly, marine life was varied and plentiful. Common lobsters, crabs, dahlia and plumose anemones, soft corals, common sea urchins, common and brittle starfish, cuckoo wrasse and the odd ling were all observed and heavily photographed. Extra special sightings were of nudibranchs (sea slugs) and Rob caught sight of an octopus.
My own highlight however was following the line of an igneous dyke cutting through the Old Red Sandstone country rocks.