by James
Hooked
15:11 in Club Dives, Club Holidays, Dive Sites, Diving, Ireland, SCUBA, Wrecks by James
The June bank holiday weekend saw CorkSAC head to Fethard on Sea, Co. Wexford for our usual mix of diving and socialising.
On Saturday morning, in bright sunshine and beneath the walls of Slade Castle, we made our preparations to dive Three Mile Rock. Diving out of Slade harbour presents its own challenges as the harbour drains almost completely at low tide, however we were lucky enough to get the boat into the water as the harbour was filling.
Three Mile Rock is a tidal dive and even at slack tide there was a strong current on the way to the bottom, however this disappeared once we dropped below a depth of 20m. We continued down to about 30m and began spiraling our way back up the rock. It was a nice scenic dive and presented divers with a who’s who of Irish diving including Conger, Crayfish, Lobster, Ling and a large shoal of Coalfish. Rockcook, which appear electric blue along their backs under torchlight, were also plentiful.
The second split of divers took in a scenic dive nearer to Hook head while we had lunch and prepared for the much anticipated trip to the Girl Arlene.
The Girl Arlene, a fishing trawler wrecked in almost 30m of water, did not disappoint. On descent we were amazed at the abundance of fish life. Predominantly poor cod, or pouting, but there were also plenty of ling, some conger eels and lobster. Those looking closely were also likely to find butterfish (gunnel), blennies, dragonets and sea scorpions.
After the fourth split had returned from another scenic dive off Hook Head we realised exactly the extent to which Slade Harbour drains at low tide. We could not get the boat anywhere near the slip . Thankfully, the kind folks from Hook SAC were on hand to use their specialised equipment (an Interantional 784 tractor) to extract our boat from the mud.
The tides were not really working in our favour on Sunday so we decided to go back to the Girl Arlene (twice) as it was one of the few sites we knew we could dive mid tide. It is true testament to this dive that while some members dived this site three times in two days, it seemed to get better each dive. For this diver, the treat on Sunday was a small octopus spotted on the second dive. He swam briefly across the bottom and set down again where he performed a colour change that a small group of us were luck enough to witness.
It is fair to say we could not have had such a good weekend without the help of the Hook Sub Aqua Club. They retrieved our boat for us both days and filled our bottles Saturday and Sunday night. Thanks guys, your efforts are greatly appreciated.
The slideshow photos can be seen on Flickr here -> Hook Head – June ’10
The Photo slide show is a cool innovation. You must show me how it is done.
Several steps.
First, upload to flickr.
- upload the photos into a flickr set.
- copy the URL of the flickr set.
Second, use flickrslidr.com to get the slideshow code.
- go to http://flickrslidr.com/
- paste the url of the set into the space provided, set the size etc (I did 350 x 350).
- click create slideshow.
- copy the stuff in the “Code” box (this is what goes in the blog).
Finally write your blog:
- Enter the blog text as normal.
- Change the entry mode from visual to HTML (top right of the box you are typing into).
- Paste the code to embed the slideshow in there (I did it between the first and second paragraphs).
- You may want to change align=”centre” to align=”right”.
Seems complex but its not too bad. If you know a little HTML you can customise it without regenerating the code. There is also a method straight from the flickr site that looks a bit nicer but I couldn’t customise it quite how I wanted. Will try that again next time.