Cork Sub Aqua Club

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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Octopus

Declan Garnish Pier

The first Saturday was the only day that no diving was possible due to weather. Sunday and Monday followed the pattern of a brief respite from overnight winds in the morning and early afternoon before it blew up again later. But two dives (albeit with lumpy boat trips) were possible both days. From Tuesday we were able to travel further afield round to the south side of Dursey Island.
Drift dives proved to be unexpectedly popular. I have seen four planned drift dives ever with Cork SAC (intentional ones as opposed to mis-timed slack water) and two of those were last week. It is something we should do a bit more often because they are a blast. We calculated that on the second drift dive on Friday, one buddy pair must have traveled almost two miles in 45 minutes. Unlike in Renvyle, when the first night dive was a highlight, this year the traditional night dive was nothing to write home about, so I won’t blog about it either. By Thursday things had calmed down enough for a dive at Crow head (where the octopus posed for the camera). By Friday my favourite dive site: the Cow was dive-able and that was a fabulous dive. Saturday we went back to the dive sites nearer Garnish Pier to allow the boats to be pulled earlier. The best diving was Thursday and Friday.
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Cork Sub Aqua will be holding an open night in Counihans Bar near the GPO, on Thursday 19th March, 2009 at 8pm. If you have an existing qualification, e.g. PADI, BSAC or other CMAS, please come along and find out more about diving with our club.

We have a defined crossover plan for most recognised diving qualifications, so whether you’ve dived here or abroad, recently, or in the dim-and-distant past, we should be able to get you diving in the open water before long. Our club has two well-equipped RIBs and dives regularly around Cork and further afield.

Members will be on hand to answer any questions you may have. Come along, enjoy a few drinks, and chat about what diving with our club is like.

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.

Inbhear Sceine dive club once again organised a very successful regional dive weekend, where over sixty divers gathered together in Cahersiveen to dive and socialise.

Plenty of basking sharks were around, and these played a merry game of cat-and-mouse with some of our divers, who managed to overcome their fear of snorkelling, at least temporarily, in order to see these impressive creatures up-close.

We were very fortunate overall with the weather. Some of our divers were lucky enough to get off early enough on Friday to get down for an evening dive, where the vis was reportedly spectacular. On Saturday, the rain finally arrived on our way back from our second dive, then departed again by Sunday morning, when we headed off for the Skelligs.

A very pleasant, if cold, dive accompanied the predictably breathtaking scenery. We pulled the boats just before the rain came back again, and headed back to base more than satisfied with the weekend’s diving.

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.