I didn't manage to get in the water this weekend.  I should have been going up to Rosehearty on the Moray Firth on Saturday, but getting up at silly o'clock wasn't appealing after a Friday that started with a 6.30 am meeting and ended with a rehearsal that finished at 9.30 pm.  And on Sunday I had a tree to cut down. 

As I walked along the beach at Carnoustie on Sunday, the water was crystal clear.  You could see every frond of seaweed, every tiny shard of shell in  the coarse sand.  I don't know whether the vis at Catterline would have been as good - it's much more silty, and gets stirred up easily by the resident seals - but I did wish I were underwater.

In the end I nearly was: the dogs swam and then shook themselve all over me so I got nearly as wet as I used to before my drysuit was fixed.  And I had a lovely time beachcombing, which is the next best thing to diving.

It'll be a fortnight before I'm back in the water - I'll be in Gloucestershire next weekend, clearing up my late mother's flat.  I do hope the weather holds.  It's about time we had a decent summer, with good vis, no storms, no days blown out due to easterlies, no constant heavy rain...  If I'd started diving last year I might not have seen it through, conditions were so bad so often; it would be great to show last years' trainees what diving's really all about. 

Now that the clocks have gone forward we should be beginning our Wednesday evening dives soon.  I can't wait to get wet again!

Into the murk.

Yesterday I went diving.  Nothing new there, but this summer has been different.  The weather has been no better or worse than previous years - indeed, a lot better than a couple of years ago when we had torrential rain almost every day - but the vis has been rubbish.

Now I don't know whether that's a cyclical thing - I haven't been diving long enough - or whether it's a freak of this year.  One of the club says it's the worst long-term vis he's ever known; another reckons it's a plankton bloom.  All I know is that if it had been like this last year I'd probably have given up diving, so I hope it doesn't put off this year's crop of trainees.

So - yesterday.  The sea was fairly calm in the bay at Catterline but as we headed north to Crawton it got choppier.  Arriving under the cliff a wall of noise and the stench of guano met us from thousands of nesting birds who dive-bombed us all the time we were above water, and the swell was very noticeable. 

If only they'd been this easy to see!

Once in the water I thanked Providence that my buddy (who was leading) had a white cylinder so at least there was something to spot.  The vis was maybe as much as 1 metre.  Looking very closely one could see that the wall would be very pretty, if only one could have seen more.  I did spot dead men's fingers, tiny anemones and a whole nursery of baby common starfish, plus a few sunstars.

I was diving with new neoprene socks in my wellies and soon started having trouble finning.  The socks are a lot thinner than my old feather-filled ones and don't fill up the boot in the same way so my boots and fins were heading south, away from my ankles.  Stopping to hoick them up, I lost sight of my buddy.  The training kicked in: look all around for 1 minute, go up a bit and look around some more, repeat until you reach the surface.  No sign of her until a flurry of bubbles erupted below me like tiny mercury parachutes and a DSMB popped up almost under my nose.  We must have been within a couple of yards of each other all along.  We gave up.  Total dive time: 10 minutes.

Three couples dived, none came up together.  I know there's no such thing as a bad dive, but some are definitely better than others!