Club Life Blog

Our trip to Wreckspeditions on the West coast of Scotland almost ended before it began. I woke at 7am the day before to an email from the dive operator, Jason, saying he'd slipped, hurt his back, and would almost certainly have to cancel our trip. However, all was not quite lost. I quickly rang the divers, waking some (sorry again), and everyone - except one diver - cheerfully agreed to keep travelling to Scotland and see what we could salvage from the trip.

Of all places in the world for this to happen, this was the very best one - Aga and I did our Advanced Diver in the area a few years ago, and did a huge amount of research on shore diving sites. Quickly the team secured gas, O₂, and started looking into shore diving.

The area around the Firth of Clyde makes for, in my opinion, some of the best diving in the UK. It offers dive sites in three quite different marine environments - the sea lochs, the Irish Sea, and the Firth itself. All abound with life - brightly coloured anemones, huge starfish, langoustines, sea fans, dead men’s fingers, and a huge variety of crabs, many carrying their homes on their backs. Much can be seen by shore diving, but to get to the wrecks we needed a boat.

Fortunately, when we assembled at Dunoon, Jason had recovered enough to be willing to take us out - so our boat diving was back on! And what a boat it was. Only a few metres longer than the Richmond Explorer, the way it sliced through the chop amazed us, more used to rougher transits. Jason was a superb skipper and dive manager, and when we finished our dives we had a choice of tea, coffee, soup, or hot chocolate with whipped cream, marshmallows, sprinkles, and a chocolate finger(!) - this followed by flapjacks or brownies that he baked himself. Apparently there is a competition amongst dive boat skippers in Scotland for the best post-dive snacks. These are people I can get along with.

Two wrecks on the first day - the Seagull and the MV Akka. The Seagull is a small trawler, sunk recently enough for there to be CDs and VHS tapes in her cabins (the dirty ones long since removed, apparently), covered in anemones, sea squirts, dead men’s fingers and sea fans. The Akka was a bulk cargo carrier that sank in 1956, and now lies intact and upright at 25m or so, absolutely carpeted with brittlestars.

The second day worked to remind us that heatwaves aren’t all that bad really. A strong nor’easter threatened to blow out the afternoon’s dive, while it rained hard in the morning. First we headed to the Gantocks, just off Dunoon. The Gantocks are a rock formation almost perfectly situated for divers, in that not only are they a great dive site, but due to their location in the middle of the Clyde have provided many of the area’s wrecks. A lovely dive site in its own right, with a gentle swim around the pinnacle providing different environments for life on each side of the tidal flow. We then dived a collection of WW2 landing craft (US-built LCM(6)) sheltered far up Loch Goil, carpeted with life, but we were able to see the name plate of one of the craft with its hull number.

For the third day, we dived one of the better known wrecks in the area, the Avrella, A small trawler in about 25m of water, bursting with colourful life. The second dive of the day was One Tree Wall, a wall dive with, well, one tree on it. I can’t write much more on it, as I missed that dive to sun myself on the surface.

For our final day of diving we went to Inverkip Jetty. This derelict oil terminal for a long-gone power station stretches well out to sea with multiple piers providing a lot of metal for life to gather around. As well as the now-usual carpet of brittlestars, we saw some enormous sunstars, a variety of anxious crabs and far too many jellyfish for my liking. Afterwards, we returned to the Akka. Too big to dive in a single dive, we all returned with a plan formed after a comprehensive brief given by Jason to see what we had missed the first time. We were lucky enough to see a French nuclear submarine sailing down the Clyde as well as the PS Waverley, the last ocean-going paddle steamer in the world, while we enjoyed our hot chocolate bobbing on the surface.

We had a brilliant time with Jason at Wreckspeditions. I cannot praise them highly enough, they did everything they possibly could to make our trip as enjoyable as possible. The diving in this area has some of the best the UK has to offer so if you are thinking about a trip next year (and I know many of you are!) you couldn’t find a better dive operation than Wreckspeditions.