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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.

Jim and Donnacha and their fishing rods did their best to depopulate the coastal waters of mackerel and pollock. Rory, Joe, Gerry and Declan checked moorings and were rewarded with bags of crab claws by grateful fishermen. In the end they were asking not to be given any more crab claws. There are only so many you can eat. One of the moorings they checked turned out to be just a paint pot filled with concrete and buoyed. Worryingly another dive club from Dublin had moored to it on the previous Sunday, with overnight gale force winds forecast ! We were told by a wind surfer that it wasn’t actually a mooring and the the other club were alerted to the fact by Gerlyn who tracked them down by the noise of their compressor. They wisely decided to pull the boat before the gale hit.
An attempt to win the talent competition at Lenaghmore Community Centre was abandoned because the lads brought nine-month-old Fionn along and it would have been child cruelty to subject him to the Allihes version of X Factor. Instead we had to be content to lower the standard of singing in Jimmy’s pub enough that it encouraged participation by less musically able locals too. Breaking the tyranny of the talented is our cultural legacy to the music of the area.
House 6 were treated to big brother Allihes style in the form of a CCTV broadcast from a cow shed. This was a bit of a puzzle because all the cows were outside (as city-slicker Gerry can confirm after complaining about being kept awake by mooing). Also it is months away from calving. Donnacha tried to track down the source of the mystery broadcast by pretending to be searching nearby barns for a non-existent dog, but with no success. The grumpy looking Declan pictured above was also kept awake, but by snoring rather than mooing. The Limerick man, without anything more traditionally pointy and metallic to hand finally resorted to throwing a pillow at 4AM.