Cork Sub Aqua Club

Lucie and I were lucky enough to visit dingle last weekend and do a couple of dives ahead of next weeks club trip to Dingle, Co. Kerry.

It was a great weekend with Seals, Dolphins and the Sun all making an appearance. Here’s a short video of the highlights (apologies for the poor video quality on the deeper dives).

Video updated 29/11/2010 to include some footage of the thornback rays we saw in September.

Who’da thought you’d ever see me getting up at 6 for a dive? Maybe on holidays, where I knew that within minutes of clambering from the warm water I’d be sitting down to a nice breakfast, but in Ireland, in April?

But circumstances meant that if I didn’t take this opportunity I’d probably end up waiting at least another week for the first dive of 2010, so, even though my drysuit was still broken, I decided to brave it. Glad I did, but you probably guessed that.

We dropped into about 8 metres just off the rock. A bit of bother with the bilge had added another twelfth, so we decided to play it safe and head roughly North and West instead of following the reef out to sea. The kelp was punctuated by a series of short sandy-bottomed gullies, each of which seemed to have its own micro current system. At one point I resolved to point into the current and just fin to stand still, but even staying as low as possible this was exhausting.

So we went up and over a ridge and things slackened off a little. We hit a nice bit of a sandy plain, with a few rocks thrown in for good measure. Viz wasn’t fantastic; a bit gloomy, but not so as you couldn’t have a poke around without losing your buddy. There were a good few pollock around, a few wrasse, assorted crabs..

When my buddy was down near fifty, I stuck up an SMB. Still a bit rusty, after practically no diving last year, so I forgot to keep the line taught and it snagged on the reel after I’d inflated. I tried to fix it, but I was being dragged away from my buddy with the current, so I let it float. When we tried to do our safety stop we were being dragged along at a good old rate, so, without a buoy to help our cox’n find us, it seemed prudent to just surface.

We came up in the channel between the Bream and the Head, a little South of where we’d like to have been, but a combination of good planning in bringing along the second boat, and good boatmanship meant we were back in the boat soon enough, recovered reel and all.

And back home in time for Sunday dinner. Beat that.

One great aspect of being a CorkSAC member is that you acquire skills that open up a whole world of diving in exotic locations. One such location is the Great Barrier Reef.

There are numerous  operators offering access to this world heritage site (one so vast that it is visible from space). Last August two CorkSAC members took a liveaboard out of Cairns with the Deep Sea Divers Den (http://www.diversden.com.au).

Deep Sea Divers Den differ from many operators in that their live-aboard boat, Ocean Quest, stays at sea. Clients are transferred daily on a shuttle boat. Their setup offers a rare degree of flexibility as divers can choose a trip of any duration departing any day of the week.

Facilities on the boat were excellent and the staff friendly and knowledgeable. Ocean Quest dives on Norman & Saxon Reefs which are busy dive sites but offer a great chance to see many tropical favourites as can be seen in the following video.

I hadn’t dived the Folia for several years, not because club dives on the Folia are especially rare, (there had been a few already in 2009), but because I just happened to be unavailable whenever one was arranged. So I was looking forward to this. My recollection was that the wreck is really quite impressive. She lies at a depth of 33 to 38 meters several miles off Ardmore Co Waterford, and is within sight of Youghal and Ardmore. Despite some imperfect visibility it was a very enjoyable dive.
The problem of photographing and describing a wreck the size of the Folia is a bit like describing and photographing the grand canyon. It is difficult to convey the impressive scale of a wreck in a series of photographs or words, especially if conditions on the dive were not especially favorable for photography. I would like to dive the wreck again with clearer viz, like I had the previous time I dived, and a fast wide lens. The Folia is one of those dives that people like to do many times because it is probably one of the largest wrecks at a non-decompression diving depth off the south coast. There is always something new to discover. OK the Kowloon Bridge was an order of magnitude larger, but since the bow section collapsed also an order of magnitude less fascinating.

Sometimes known as the Folio, her real name was Folia. Militarily speaking the U-Boat that sank her did a pretty good job by preventing a large cargo of artillery shell casings from reaching the Western Front. The deaths of seven of the crew was the sad price paid. Despite extensive salvage that has destroyed much of the superstructure aft of the boilers there are still many of the shell casings to be found. We saw evidence that salvage continues. In effect she is being turned into a habitat for marine life. There are lots of nooks and crannies on the wreck. This is a good place to see congers. As a consequence of being a cozy home for fish, it gets some anglers, so watch out for hooks and fishing line.

I used a 28% mix, and we had about a 20 minute bottom time with plenty of no-decompression limit to spare, partly due to a miscalculation on my part, we headed back to the shotline a tad early. Launching from Knockadoon was OK, but there were waves coming around the point which made retrieval a bit challenging. Thanks to Brian for towing and coxing, and to Helen for organizing the dive, also Joost for helping us drop the shotline on the correct spot.

For those interested in the history of the wreck there is an article on the Waterford County Museum webpage: http://www.waterfordcountymuseum.org/exhibit/web/Display/article/160/4/?lang=en

Four divers from Cork SAC, Steve Clare myself and Brian went to Cocos Island and Costa Rica in August. Since then quite a few people have been asking me: “when are we going to see your photos from Cocos?”. You see the problem has been that, after my old camera gave up the ghost in 2008 I kinda lost interest in underwater photography for a while, before buying Graham’s old camera to try out an SLR. With one thing and another I only got about half a dozen dives with the SLR before I went to Cocos, and really only decided to bring the camera at the last minute, so I have been a bit shy about showing the photos which I know to be not the best. Nevertheless the dives in Cocos were brilliant and I hope the photos don’t do them too much of an injustice. Anyhow Brian has the better photos, so ask him too!
If you ever saw the start of ‘Jurassic Park’, the jungle covered island that the intrepid dinosaur seekers fly into is Isla Del Coco: or Cocos island. The island, and the waters around it, are a national park of Costa Rica. Eight park rangers and maybe some coast guard are the only residents. To put it in an Irish context, Cocos is about the size of Valentia Island, maybe a bit smaller. It is a thirty six hour boat trip from Puntarenas (The main pacific port of Costa Rica). It is steep with dense foliage, and volcanic in origin. The coastline, apart from a few bays, consists mainly of steep cliffs down which numerous waterfalls cascade. According to Wikipedia it gets an an average annual rainfall of over 7,000 mm (275 in). That is about seven times the annual rainfall that Cork gets. There is a dry season and a wet season. We went in the wet season. The boat has a rainwater collection system. Long hot showers are not a problem, the tap water is drinkable, and unique in my experience of liveaboards elsewhere: in Egypt or Australia; there is a laundry service aboard ! But it didn’t rain that much, a bit for the first few days, the sea was 27 to 29 degrees C, and we were glad of a bit of cloud cover because when the sun shone it was almost too hot. All the waterfalls are very atmospheric, like a lost world, but the amount of fresh water during the wet season tends to affect underwater visibility a bit. Dry season it seems is clearer but with fewer fish.
Enough about annual rainfall and laundry, what about the sharks? There are many to see, on every dive, and sometimes your field of vision is filled with them. So dense that the hammerheads almost look like flocks of birds wheeling and swooping above. Not just Hammerheads, but also silver tips, white tips, black tips (which we didn’t see), galapagos sharks, silkies (which kinda look like galapagos sharks except to an expert), whale sharks (which another boat saw). The difference between white tips and silver tips is that white tips have white tips just on dorsal fin and top of tail and are smaller, silver tips are larger and have a silver trailing edge to all their fins. I have seen big sharks before, even hammerheads, but never the huge schools that you see at Cocos. Plenty of rays too including manta, marble ray, and mobula. The usual reef wildlife that would amaze you elsewhere: moray, turtles, lobsters and all, seem almost to be bit players, with the sharks as the stars of the show.
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Fivebeard Rockling

Bullen’s Bay lies to the east of the Old Head of Kinsale so it is a good spot for a shore dive, snorkel or night dive if the wind is Northerly westerly or south westerly. There is a mixture of sandy and rocky sea bed types with a reef a little offshore that is exposed from mid to low tide. Depths of between 5 and 7 meters are normal at high tide. During the summer there is plenty to see with pipefish being fairly numerous, and dogfish, even cuttlefish. During the winter it is a bit more sparse but there is always the chance of finding something a bit unusual such as the fivebeard rockling pictured opposite.

Okay, so enough talking, time to go diving!

The weather forecast is wrong as per usual and its actually a gorgeously crisp day with skies so azure blue it almost hurts to look at them.  It’s obviously time to get wet, and get the diving season started in earnest.  I meet Michiel a little early and we complete his fitness test – a new mandatory requirement from CFT – so we hit the water.  Swimming 100m out from Oysterhaven slip, a quick bracing duck dive and then a short tow whilst practicing EAR.  Finally back into the slip.  Michiel heads into to change while I get my camera a look for any signs of photogenic hermit crabs that sometimes may be found close inshore.  Not today, maybe next time.

By the time I give up Dave has towed down the new boat and elected himself to cox.  We all jump into helping prepare the boat and launch it, before sorting, assembling and loading our gear on board.  We elect to try a simple dive out in Newfoundland Bay (that’s “to the left and around a bit” in CSAC parlance).  It appears to be a good choice for as soon as we pull in to our determined dive site we see at least five seals watching curiously our every move.  The come quite close, even to within 15m and Michiel and I are increasingly hopeful of an underwater encounter with these majestical creatures.

Alas it was not to be, but we weren’t disappointed with what we saw.  A variety of different crab species from the tiniest of hermit crabs (I finally got that picture) to devellish looking velvet swimmers, to big bruisers of edible ones.  Anemones and other brightly coloured shells really made for a great first dive of the year…  Back to the slip to recover and tidy up the boat, new covers and all, before heading home for a well deserved hot chocolate.

The wreck of the Santo lies in water up to 35 meters deep (depending on tide) to the south east of Roches point. It is a long boat trip from Oysterhaven, so we have also dived her out of Crosshaven instead. When we last dived her on a spring low tide she was about 30 meters down. She was a dredger, and her most distinctive feature is the chain of buckets if these can be found. The Mark ‘Santo2′ on the Cork SAC GPS can be used to drop a shot close to the anchor. Reeling east or a little north east from the anchor the boiler can be found. Beyond the boiler there should be a big sprocket and stretching away from that the chain of buckets which are at least a meter in diameter. I should point out that the bucket chain shown above was taken on a dive a few years ago, my buddy and I failed to find them on the most recent dive. If visibility is poor they can be difficult to locate. The wreck is small, but seems to be comparable in size to the Aud, though in fact she was only about a fifth the size. Her boiler is upright but with large holes and has formed a home for fish, which seem to be abundant on the wreck: pouting and cod in the boiler, but also conger, lobster and cuckoo wrasse around the wreck. You can find YouTube video of a blonde ray on the Santo from John Ryan of NMCI SAC. The Santo sank in 1900 on her way from Scotland to Formosa (then part of Japan), now Taiwan.

Sunday morning 8AM at Aughrusmore pier near Cleggan. Dave consults the chart. The weather doesn’t look too bad in the Harbour, but there were big waves and white horses out at sea. We had an eventful time towing up yesterday, basically one boat had to go back to Cork due to trailer problems. But two boats made it. Dave made the dificult decision not to launch this morning due to the weather, it was a marginal decision, but the right one. Shore dive Sunday afternoon. We used the facilities of Scubadive west. Lots of pipefish (both snake pipefish and greater pipefish), Scallops, a small conger and a tompot blenny sharing a cave.

Thanks very much to Rory, for towing up his boat and coxing for the week.

Monday we dived the east side of High Island. The ground was pretty good, but not as good as the west side as we would discover later in the week. Pretty flat at thirty meters, it got much better as we got shallower, above twenty meters. Diving with Trish and Lucas we saw two big Congers.

For the last dive of the day we went around to the west side of the island.

Tuesday we were again able to get around to the better west side of High Island. A playful seal pup hung out with Clare and Lisa for their dive. In the afternoon we dived again at the west side of High Island. This time we dived a bit nearer the edge at a wall that had plenty of crayfish and lobsters proving that the fishermen don’t get them all.
Brendan cycled up from Cork. Well done !

Wednesday again at the west side of High Island. A 40 meter dive with lots of curious cuckoo wrasse checking us out. That night, with deckchair and white wine provided for the shore marshals; James, Lisa, Gerry, Trish and Dave R did a night dive that had the eyes of lots of cuttlefish shining back at our torches from the sea bed, small brill buried in the sand too and a sea scorpion. We were so thrilled with the cuttlefish that eight people decided to try a night dive the following evening.

Thursday. No boat diving but you don’t always need boats to dive. A few people did a 38 meter shore dive at a sheltered cove by Killary fjord and were rewarded by seeing some thorn-backed rays. The night dive went well but there was not the same abundance of cuttlefish as on Wednesday, though they were seen by Steve and Trish who ventured further out than the others.

Friday. the weather had finally calmed down enough in the morning for us to go beyond High Island so we headed to spotted rock. Watched by loads of seals (impossible to count because they kept ducking below the surface and coming back up again to fool us). We dived a wall that dropped from four meters to about fifty and met a lobster who had probably gotten big enough that it will no longer fit into a pot and ought to last well into a well deserved lobster old age.

On land there was also some wildlife to be seen, some species easier to identify than others. Ireland has only one native species of lizard, so the lizards seen by several people nearby the pier must have been: Lacerta vivipara. Nearby there were bright blue damsel-flies of which Ireland has several species, most of them living in bogs, and requiring more expert identification than I can provide.

Saturday back to Cork.

The Ling rocks are a group of submerged pinnacles only 10 kilometers or so offshore from Oysterhaven near Cork City. Popular with divers and anglers, they should be dived at slack water. Also being so far offshore they require light or northerly winds and a calm sea. The shallowest of the pinnacles has depths of 25 meters even at a neap high tide, but some of the pinnacles have shallowest depths as deep as 33 to 40 meters. You will find several marks on both of the Cork club boats’ GPS for the Lings. The marks above (N51 36.847 W08 19.191) are for the shallowest pinnacle, and are also the marks that Seamus uses. I have dived the Lings with Daunt SAC, and they dive a different slightly deeper pinnacle, near the mark called ‘Lings 4′ on both Cork GPS units.

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