Guides
Farne Island Guide - Part IV
Snowdonia (Snowden)
This guide is number four in the series and concentrates on the dive
sites rather than cover the generalities covered in Guide I.
{mosmap lat='55.629144'|lon='-1.631295' }
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Latest Photographs
A Long Clawed Squat Lobster (Munida rugosa) this one had set up shop in an old broken bottle which I guess forms a good and secure home.
Dropping to the bottom about eighty meters from the cliff face and you are faced with a bottom comprising of boulders with coarse sand between them, the boulders vary in size from the size of cars to maybe a meter cubed.
A typical north east wreck dive, plates, boilers n bits. In this case probably Jan Van Ryswyck although a few vessels have foundered so the bits are somehwhat mixed!
In the shale bedrock you will also occasionally see some very nice fossils, in this case some prehistoric bi-valve
Near the end of the dive I was surrounded by a huge shoal of Saithe (Pollachius virens) unfortunately the silty water didn't do justice to the sheer amount of fish that were all around me, amazing!
Once you get down to ~25m the bottom is covered with mats of Common Brittlestars (Opthiothrix fragilis) and possibly other species, but unless starfish really float your boat would you bother spending time to identify them?
The common edible crab (cancer pagarus) you tend to get only smaller ones in shallow water but there are still plenty of them about.
These weeds 'reached for the surface' and with the small fish swimming about they were like trees and the fish like birds, pretty?
Some of the spars n bars poke up some way towards the surface
A Lions Mane Jellyfish (Cyanea capillata), when they are about deco stops are always interesting!
The closest that I can find is a lightly coloured Green Crab (Carcinus maenas) but it doesn't sit right as this one was almost orange in colour. I shall keep looking and update if I can get more details.
A shot showing part of a shoal of Saithe (Pollachius virens) hovering above the kelp line wiating for the tide to turn!
A lesser spotted dogfish (Scyliorhinus conicula), well actually there were half a dozen under the plate!
To take a few close ups, he got a bit bored and then decided that it would be a 'good thing'.....
In this case the camouflage of the Pogge (Agonus cataphractus) wasn't good enough and this live fish was caught by a Velvet swimming Crab (Necora puber)
Looking from the 'end' of the first reef out to sea. There is a band of sand then another line of rocks and reef
The tosheroon just after I have started scratting, you can see some scrap iron in the foreground, no interest to me!
A scaling shot of the thinnest section, this one doesnt seem as tapered as others and may be a spar rather than mast......
This is the other side of the same assembly.......
This is the remains of the wooden salvage dock that sank during operations, it's even less photogenic than the ship and connected via a length of blue poly-prop rope so that divers can go from one to the other in a single dive
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