Cork Sub Aqua Club

The old cliche about Irish diving is that, even though you’ll spend ninety percent of your time diving in pretty poor conditions, wondering why you even bother, every so often you’ll have a dive that makes you forget all the hardship of lousy viz, leaky drysuits, seasickness, changing in the rain, crawling through kelp, losing expensive equipment and everything else, and you’ll just think “this is what it’s all about”.

Our Indian summer struggled on for another week and the club headed west again this weekend. Some dived the U260 on Saturday, while others helped the leading diver candidates to prepare for their upcoming ordeal. On Sunday we launched from Baltimore, starting off with a pleasant dive off the Kedges. By lunchtime flat calm sea conditions and a propitious turn of the tides were starting to make it look like too good an opportunity not to do something special, so for the first time in my five odd years diving with the club, we headed to the Fastnet.

The Fastnet Rock lies about four or five miles southwest of Clear Island. Sailors will know it well, and most people will have heard of it, but most of the time it’s just a rock you glimpse on a fair day when you’re diving out of Baltimore and joke about going there for a dive. When the conditions are right, as they were this weekend, it’s a forty-five minute trip by RIB (each way). The rock itself doesn’t have quite the grandeur of Skellig Michael, but it’s pretty imposing upclose, nonetheless. There’s a small landing area at the base, so you can clamber up to the top for a view of Roaringwater Bay.

We dropped in due south of the rock in about fifteen to twenty metres. At first it seemed a little kelpy, but we quickly found a nice gully which brought us below the line of the seaweed. Although we were diving as close to slack water as we could manage, we could still feel the current pushing us along at a steady clip. By keeping down in the gully though, and sticking close to the walls, we were able to have a comfortable dive. I guess our training battling currents in the Red Sea earlier in the year paid off here.

Shoals of fish seemed to accompany us almost constantly throughout the dive, but for me the highlight of the dive was the gully walls. The bright sunlight and clear visibility made a torch almost superfluous. Combine that with such a varied terrain where life could flourish between the nooks and crannies, and the remoteness of the location which no doubt plays its part in keeping things relatively unspoilt, and it adds up to a spectacular display of colour that would be the envy of most above-water gardeners.