Back in November Ken, Alistair, Steven, and I ventured over to Loch Fyne to try out the dive at “Drishaig Reef” The dive site description on Finstrokes looked interesting and had some good reviews so we were looking forward to an interesting dive at a new site.
We all arrived on site early and although cold it was dry and a fairly bright day. The path down to the shore was quite steep so we had be quite careful climbing down with our kit, soon enough we were all organised then Alistair and I were off on our first dive.
Heading down the steep slope in reasonable vis we quickly reached 25m and came across a few nice fireworks anemones, once we had taken plenty of photos we turned right on a bearing of 240° and found the rocky reef. Although it is quite a small reef here with spaced out rocks there was loads of life to be found, with sea loch anemones, peacock worms, a good variety of squirts, and sponges clinging to each rock. There were also loads of long-clawed squat lobsters about and a few brown crabs.
We pottered around here taking a few more photos for a while before slowly working our way up the slope back towards the shore, passing an old pipe on the way at about 9m which was covered in clumps of sea squirts. After our safety stop we surfaced from a very enjoyable dive with a total time of 45mins.
Following our surface interval Steven and I went in for our dive and followed pretty much the same profile apart from only going to 20m, which is all that is really needed to see the rocky reef. We saw much of the same of life as the first dive and also another large fireworks anemone.
After some lunch Alistair, Ken, and Steven headed in for the last dive of the day and once they had explored the reef for a while they practiced some DSMB deployment which was somewhat successful.
Although only a small reef this was an interesting dive site with loads of life so was certainly worth trying.
Looks great. Will have to give that site a go myself. Great photos.