West Wales Diving 17 August
Took a call from my buddy on Saturday afternoon, the prospects for diving Sunday was not looking good, the dive centre said it was 50-50 chance that we would be diving due to bad weather and poor vis.
On Sunday morning we had around a meter and a half of swell, which reduced to less than a meter by mid afternoon, so the sea state was ok, now what would the vis be like,
As we dropped in for the first dive we had three and a half meters, which was far better than expected.
The dive site was Anderson reef, the current was running east to west, as the current was not to strong we where 15 minutes into the dive before we put up an SMB, the reef runs at a depth of 18 to 20 meters and is packed with marine life, soft corals, sponges, tube worm, lobster, crayfish, urchins, crab to name but a few, the dive lasted 38 minutes.
After some lunch we set of in search of a pinnacle that lies around one mile east of the harbour at Abercastle, normally this would be no trouble, just pop the details into the GPS and we are sorted, however without the site details to put in the GPS we had very little chance of finding the pinnacle, using the echo sounder we should be able to pick it up but after 20 minutes no luck, but we did pick up some interesting looking bottom, so what the heck lets drop down and have a look around.
Back in the water we dropped to the bottom at 18 meters, I had never seen rock formations quite like the ones I now found myself looking at, it’s a little hard to explain what the topography but it was like large slabs of slat that that had been stood on end, it did cross my mind that it could be the cargo of a wreck as Welsh slate had been transported by ship in the area many years ago, again there was plenty of marine life to see, we spent a very enjoyable 40 minutes exploring the site before popping up the DSMB and heading up for a safety stop the total dive time was 45 minutes.
Back at the dive centre we took a look at GPS records for the area of our second dive but found nothing that was close to our dive. So what do I call the site in my log, Bruce the owner of the dive centre said as you where the first one on the bottom and we have never dived the site before we will name it Mo’s reef.
So if you ever find yourself in West Wales I would be more than happy to take you on a tour of my reef