Festival

This weekend head on down to Baltimore for the Wooden Boat and Seafood Festival. Build your own boat with prizes for design, floatability and yes - sail it in the race! Traditional boat races, parades, kids crab fishing competition and the wonderful food market selling the best that Cork has on offer. Music in the square and free plates of seafood with Guinness products.

Wreck Diving Ireland

Next weekend (June bank holiday) for those interested and dived up, we're planning on doing the Kowloon on Saturday and the Sub on Sunday. Slacks are good around neap tides and there are still spaces on the rhib"Vagabond" sorry - "Wave Chieftain" hardboat is fully booked). Contact rianne@aquaventures.ie or call 028-20511 to book.

Basking sharks were again spotted just south of Baltimore's harbour entrance today - if you walk up to the Beacon you should be able to see them there tomorrow as well, particularly with a light north-westerly wind forecast tomorrow.

Night Dive

Anyone interested in a night dive tomorrow (Tue 25 May), meet at Aquaventures Dive Centre for 9 p.m. You'll need a torch - please book by phone or email today (rianne@aquaventures.ie).

ISA Diver Coxswain Course

Congratulations to Liam Keohane, Dan Hartnett & Paddy Finn on completing the ISA Diver Cox'n course over the last 2 days. It was a pleasure to have you with us and we wish you and all the members of Limerick Sub Aqua Club happy "boating" and diving with "Plassey Bird". You missed a sighting of basking sharks at the harbour's mouth after you'd gone home!
Jerry & Rianne

A beautiful bright blue sky woke us yesterday morning and we could look forward to a sunny day on and in the water. Two boats went out with divers. One to Tonelunga Rock on the north side of Cape Clear, just beyond the harbour entrance, the other to the northwest side of Kedge Island - a dive site we call the Arches. The visibility was better here than around Cape and the sandy bottom between walls, gullies and reefs reflected the light well. We had a couple of seals following us, showing off their agility and keeping an eye on what we were doing and where we changed direction. The second dive was East of Spain Point, again with gullies and reefs teaming with fish and pretty colours on the walls (anemones, urchins, starfish of all sizes including the purple and orange bloody henry, sponges and deadman's fingers galore). The lads with me were doing a few buoyancy skills as it was their first dive of the season. Despite relatively low temperatures we did two dives of just over 40 minutes and 18 to 19 mtr depth including our safety stops. Baltimore harbour is still relatively quiet with few boats, but it will no doubt fill up quickly, particularly next weekend with the Wooden Boat Festival and Sea Food Festival activities.

Diving this weekend

Boat Diving
There are still a few spaces available for boat diving tomorrow (Saturday 23rd May). Please call Rianne at Aquaventures to book. Depth will be around 15 to 20 mtr and forecast is excellent.

Diver Cox'n Training

This weekend Aquaventures will be on the water more than in it - as Limerick Sub-Aqua Club have acquired a nice new rhib and three of the club members are doing their ISA Dive Coxswain course with us. We'll be dropping some divers in the water too, as part of the skills practical and assessments on typical dive sites including a drift dive. The forecast is good and although there are classroom lessons involved too, a lot of the "work" is practical based so we look forward to perhaps spotting some basking sharks and dolphins around Sherkin and Cape Clear.

Night Diving

Last night's sky was littered with stars, no rain or wind and perfect for a night dive in Trafraska. Temperature again was 12 degrees and with low tide, we snorkelled out to gain a bit of depth and dropped into 6 metres for our descent. The visibility was excellent and there were a couple of huge spider crabs. One was just enjoying his dinner when our lights obviously disturbed him. He gave us an angry look, then took off from his perch on the wall and absailed, legs wide apart which must have measured at least half a metre, landing like a space craft in front of our faces. We reached one spot where there were loads of fish whilst other areas were totally deserted except for all manner of crabs. All cracks and holes in the wall had life inside peaking out such as smiley tompot blennies, gobies and baby conger. There were the usual urchins, common starfish, bloody henry and dahlia anemones. We had a pleasant 34 minute dive with maximum depth of 7.7 mtrs (nice and easy). Unfortunately there was no moon, hence no phosphorescence. Our UKC8 torches were wonderful and bright and we didn't need our back-ups. I love night diving but it does get too late in the height of summer when it doesn't get dark until after 11 pm

Social Media

We're learning .................... and have set up a proper facebook page for Aquaventures Diving & Snorkelling (as well as the personal facebook pages for Jerry and Rianne - please become a fan or friend.

Diving in Lough Hyne

Despite fine settled weather, there are few divers around. We therefore resorted to getting permits for Lough Hyne to do some PADI specialty training (new drysuit for a dive buddy). The viz was around 8 to 10 mtrs and water temperature 12 degrees with plenty of fish life and a good variety of creepy crawly animals on the silty bottom and rocky walls. We spotted plenty of scallops of all sizes and the small ones were "flapping" or swimming around when starfish got too close for comfort - always a nice sight.
The one thing that stood out though was the presence of nudibranch eggs everywhere, on rocks, walls, shells - truly amazing in colour and shape (and more than I have ever seen). Of course this was a dive where I didn't have the camera - isn't that always the case!
We've enjoyed light northerly winds for a number of weeks now which meant the locations west of Baltimore were all good for easy shore dives and good viz. The hardboat will get back into the water for the June bank holiday and we'll look forward to doing the Kowloon Bridge and U260 that weekend with excellent neap tides. There are still some spaces left if anyone is interested.