Cork Sub Aqua Club

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.

Two Star Tests Oysterhaven 27 July 2008

Originally uploaded by riordan_david.

James Branich, Michiel De Rooij, and Stephen Barry along with Candidates from Blackwater SAC and NMCI SAC at their Club Diver tests. All the Candidates passed, Congratulations ! Stephane Portrait, and Finbarr Murphy from Blackwater were Mon 2 testers, along with Declan O’Grady Lucie Kirby and Don MCCarthy form Cork, Fiona Duggan participated as a Mon 1. Olin O’Farrell Dave Riordan and Gerry Horan helped out.

The NMCI candidates John Ryan and Will Jagoe are the first ever to complete the certification from that club which as only been in existence for a few years.

Easter weekend the club went down to Kilcrohane for our first dive weekend away of the season. Easter was particularly early this year, so cold, rain and wind were always going to be on the agenda. We were able to put our brand new custom-built Excalibur RIB out on the water nonetheless. This was the culmination of a lot of effort by members of the club in fundraising, chasing up Sports Capital funding, drawing up detailed specs, inspecting the building process and test-driving and running-in, so we were very happy to see her used for her intended purpose.

The boat was built by Gael Force Ventures in Carrigaline to our own specification. From the beginning, members had a very definite idea of what they wanted to see in their new RIB. Having a large space for kitting up was a very big consideration. Having a slightly larger RIB than the previous ones we’ve used meant that, with a little extra thought put into the design, we could have a space large enough for two pairs of divers to don their gear and complete their buddy checks in comfort at the same time. Secure storage space for bottles, hand-holds for rough weather and ease of entry for divers were also very important considerations.

When it came to engine size, enough power to get up on the plane with ten fully-laden divers was the minimum criterion. That had to be balanced with economy, ease-of-maintenance, and the need to be forgiving to inexperienced coxswains. In the end, we settled for a 175 horsepower Suzuki 4-stroke. A large capacity fuel tank will help to minimise delay and spillage from messing around with extra fuel containers.

As the build progressed members were on hand to inspect how things were going and provide feedback to the rest of the club. As the plans materialised, Jim, our equipments officer, was able to carry the opinions of the club members back to the boat builders and fine-tune the specification. Decisions were made on the ideal dimensions of the A-Frame, fitting of the O2 bottles etc, even as the workers put the finishing touches to the fibreglass hull.

Time will tell if our new boat lives up to all our expectations. With a bit of luck, we’ll get the good weather soon to let her show her full potential, but if the weather stays a little choppy, well she should be able to cope with that too. We’ll be having a little ceremony before the end of the month to welcome her officially to the club and show our appreciation to everybody, in the club and out, who made this possible.

Just a quick note on the blog to let people know that I have booked the NMCI pool and a training room there.
Crossover pool training will begin (and hopefully finish) on January 19th 9:00Am to 10:30Am, crossover lectures 11AM to 2PM the same day. This session will be for people with existing qualifications from a different certification agency only, there will be no beginners at this session.
Any people who contacted us in 2007, expressing an interest in joining Cork Sub Aqua Club will have been sent an invite to a Club Open Night Thursday, January 10th.8pm. Soho Bar, Grand Parade, Cork. They will also have been sent the details of the required medical test. We will have a better idea of numbers and grades after the Open Night.
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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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There are few venues in Ireland where four dives would be possible despite force eight gales. Knightstown on Valentia Island was chosen for the October weekend because of various sheltered spots, but even so, suitable locations for diving were few.

We were joined by six or seven enthusiastic divers from NMCI SAC. They stayed relatively sober compared to the Cork bunch, but seemed to have enjoyed the weekend a lot.
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Fiona and I spent our honeymoon in Capetown and its environs, and although diving wasn’t the primary objective, we couldn’t pass by the opportunity to get under the water in some fashion. Our first dive was in the Two Oceans aquarium in the V&A Waterfront area, where we got to dive in the predator tank. Any qualified diver can do this for a small fee, and it seemed like an interesting way to get acquainted with the local marine megafauna. The tank is about 4 metres deep at its deepest and has the surface area approximately of a tennis court. It’s doughnut shaped with a modest anticlockwise current, and stocked with three sharks, a turtle, and various other fish including mantas and a shoal of yellowfin tuna. The sharks themselves didn’t seem to bothered by our presence, except for one of the smaller ones which approached us on a number of occasions, only to be dispatched by our divemaster’s high-tech shark-poking device (which looked suspiciously like half a broom handle).

Our first attempt to get under the open water was with a local expat Scotsman called Iain Robertson who operates out of Simon’s Town on the shores of False Bay. I was looking forward to seeing the famous Kelp Forests of this area. I’ve never been a huge fan of kelp, especially the short dense variety that thrives around the Irish coast, but the descriptions I’ve seen of the local algae seemed like a completely different matter. In the end, I was to be a little disappointed; a recent change to the licensing regulation for diving in this protected area led us to being caught without the requisite paperwork on the day, and we had to be content with a snorkel instead from the local Boulders beach – a spot frequented by a large colony of African penguins. The most I managed was a 3 metre duck dive, but I think I managed to get some sense of what the area had to offer.

Our last couple of nights in South Africa were spent in the small seaside town of Hermanus, where, following a day of whale-watching around Dyer’s Island,  we hooked up with a local dive operator – Scuba Africa – and finally managed to get a couple of proper open-water dives. The temperatures and viz here were comparable to what we get back home, but the amount of life and the colours reminded me more of tropical waters. Crayfish in particular were in plentiful supply, with every decent-sized crack in the reef providing shelter to anything up to eight or nine of them.

Apparently we were very lucky with the weather there. For the previous few weeks, strong winds and rain had led to a large number of cancelled dives, but on the day we arrived, the previous evenings winds had dissipated and we enjoyed a beautiful sunny day. On our second dive, we spotted a whale in the harbour. It would have been something else to be able to get into the water with her, but conservation regulation prevented the boat from getting too near. Instead, we were treated to a swimming display from a curious seal; a fitting end to our day’s diving and the last day of our holiday.

The village of Allihes was the location for the Cork SAC August week long diving holiday. The coastal village is overlooked by eroded hills and a worked out copper mine (top right). The houses are brightly painted. Strangely for a village with three pubs and and only one shop, there is also a disused methodist chapel that was used by the miners from 1812 to 1884 (bottom left). Abstinence has not been an enduring success here, least of all for the members of Cork SAC.
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Kris Hammerhead

Hammerhead

Seven Members of Cork SAC: Denis, Jim, Diarmuid, Helen, Anthony, Fiona and Dave made a trip to the Brothers Islands and Hurghada Egypt. to sample the diving there. We were joined by ten divers from the UK and one from South Africa.
We spent six days on the liveaboard: “Hurricane” and one day ashore. After a first day spent diving near Hurghada at the coral reef: Erg Abu Ramada, and it’s nearby pinnacle Gota Abu Ramada, we sailed overnight for the Brothers Islands. The two Brothers Islands are about half a mile from each other about nine hours boat trip south east from Hurghada. They both have spactular fringing reefs. The dives on both the Brothers Islands were very challenging, with strong currents and some choppy seas, but they were also very rewarding. On at least half the dives we saw sharks, mainly Hammerheads and Grey Reef Sharks, although the UK diver pictured going head to head with the hammerhead opposite, Kris, also saw a thresher shark.
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Ballinskelligs weekend June 2007. Clare drives the ‘garda’ boat with ‘Su’ in front and ‘ddy’ behind. (replacing the boat’s name with a crossword clue because I don’t want that kind of internet traffic) . One of the Declans looks a little concerned, the other enjoys his lollipop.
A wet and windy Saturday saw no diving, some went for a swim, others for a walk, and it was difficult to know who got wetter. Sunday was much better, and Monday glorious. But the sea had been churned up a bit, and was still too choppy for the Skelligs.
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