Tag: eyemouth

‘It’ll be reet!’ was the motto of the weekend.

We’re creatures of habit in Robin Hood Hood Dive Club and true to form the weekend’s fun and frolics started with a few welcome beers in Oblo with Steve, Keith and Amanda leading the way as the first to arrive, soon to be followed by Bev, Andy, Jay, Sue, ‘Birthday Boy’ Nigel and eventually Tom. Ian decided to spend the evening in his room to finish charging his torches but the rest of us decided that with a very civilised ropes off time of 10.45am the next day – It’ll be reet!

Next morning Tim and Liz made a very early start at 5am to arrive just in time for breakfast, leaving a very disgruntled Merlin in the van.

Whilst the day dawned bright and sunny the wind had whipped up a bit of a swell but our intrepid skipper Gary was not to be deterred and we headed out on Wavedancer with only one fully working engine and a slightly bent prop – It’ll be reet!

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After a leisurely sail past St Abbs Head we arrived at our dive site, Anemone Gullies, for what turned out to be the first of four cracking dives over the weekend. With 15+ meters of viz and abundant life, including wolf fish, octopus, shoals of Pollock & Herring, wrasse, lots and lots of lobster and a 1.5 meter long Anglerfish (Tim/Liz – you do know things look bigger under water?) everyone agreed that UK diving does not get better than this!

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After the second dive of the day at West Hurker we headed back to Eyemouth and despite a VERY lumpy steam, during which the skipper was heard to say “better have a Haribo before we die”, the boat was full of very happy smiling divers – It’ll be reet!

A couple of deco beers, showers and a meal at Oblo provided the evening entertainment before everyone turned in for the night to be up bright eyed and bushy tailed for a 9.30am ropes off.

Sunday kicked off with a superb dive at the much maligned Pettico Wick followed by Skelly Hole and Anemone Gullies to compete another memorable diving day.

Thank you to our skipper Gary and his crew, Dougie “Aye”, Graeme and James for looking after us on the boat and to Jade and Alex at the Home Arms.

Thanks to all for making this another cracking Robin Hood Dive Club trip!

Pictures courtesy of Jay Lawson.

Limping boat, dolphins, scooters, great visibility, leaks and sunshine………Just a brief summary of this week’s instalment of the ROHO 2019 calendar.

Thursday begins with a cracking weather forecast and 12 excited divers readying up for the weekend’s festivities, this soon takes a temporary hit with the news of dive boat gremlins having gotten loose, thus demoting our dive boat Wavedancer to the Waveplodder. 11 of the 12 divers are so blinded by the thought of some Scottish sun and North Sea dipping we happily head up on the Friday with some more local diving destinations in mind.

In true ROHO fashion, we pick up a straggler and bolster our numbers! Welcome to the club Genine Keogh, who funnily enough I’d already met on a liveaboard in Egypt last October, small world! Soon attention turns to diving with a warm-up through Tyes Tunnel, visibility turns out to be good, water still has that cheek flushing coldness with a successful (for most) dive to follow. Wet dive number 1 for Liz… The Glanmire is available for the 2nd dive which is duly jumped upon by many, all reported a nice dive with no issues, bar Wet Dive number 2 for Liz….

Saturday night saw a nice meal at the Ship Inn and sensible decisions were made ready for a 9am RO Sunday to find another spot of slack over the Glanmire. Visibility seemed to be even better than the day prior and the dive club had 2 new friends today breaking their salt-water virginity, in testing for their Britannic Expedition later this year, both scooters working flawlessly and sending their riders far from the wreck in search for god only knows what, finding absolutely nothing, but bloody good fun!

Wet dive number 3 for Liz? I can’t quite remember due to the appearance of the dolphins I had ordered, but the final dive of the trip being a nice leisurely wolf-fish hunt starting on the landing pad, the scooters had new yobs on them this time providing smiles of equal grandeur.

All in all a successful trip, always well looked after by the team from Divestay, plenty of post-dive hot drinks and snacks by the Duracell bunny that is Dougie. Reports from MarineQuest divers that visibility around Bass Rock and the Isle of May being particularly poor over the weekend showed that maybe the dive gods were really looking out for us after all.

Chris

Worrisome weather reports on Tuesday made diving look unlikely, but in the event the storms gave way to glorious sunshine, and those chancers who were not deterred were rewarded with decent viz as a bonus.

Unlike Noah’s arc we arrived in Eyemouth in anything but 2 by 2 but by last food orders we were all installed in Oblos for pizza and burgers. We even picked up some extra non-trip members, (stealth Tom has a habit of popping up when least expected 🙂 ) who were on another boat.

Saturday brought with it an early start and optimistic blue sky. By 8:30 we were ropes-off and out to sea.

Dive 1 was a little light on sealife but some reported seeing “a fish” 😉 the viz was surprisingly good however and everybody had a decent dive. Liz enjoyed her return to OC bubble blowing, but seemingly has grown more buoyant over winter… 9 degrees water temps didn’t seem too harsh when basking in the sunshine on the deck between dives. Well some of us were basking, others were barfing….

Dive 2 was a much better dive with reports of dab, wolffish, sea bass, …everybody saw a fish at least. It’s not often you’re back in harbour by lunchtime, after two dives, but the early bird catches the worm.

Getting early dives in gave us lots of time to do more with the day so we set off on the ‘brief’ coastal walk to St Abbs via Coldingham Bay (and the St Vedas Hotel for a quick fluid top-up). Whilst in St Abbs it would be rude not call in Ebbcars Cafe and I can certainly vouch for their cheese scone and special hot chocolate.

To the tune of creaking knees and much wingeing it was back up the hill to find the New Asgard sign (as featured in the Avengers End Game movie) for a now-famous St Abbs photo opportunity.

Call us spontaneous if you like, but knowing that a table reservation in Eyemouth was off the cards we chanced our luck with The New Inn at Coldingham and they didn’t let us down. This however necessitated a further walk up the creel path in the early summer sunshine. Some of us had used suncream, some of us had not, and by now there was a lot of head skin starting to glow a tad pink. We at least had walked up an appetite.

Day 2 brought an even earlier start due the dredger wanting to anchor off the harbour for a spot of channel clearing. This inspired Gary our skipper to suggest one of the best dive boat ideas in years, “forgo full English and have hot bacon sandwiches between dives”. An absolutely brilliant idea!

Dive 1 was again a cracking dive on black cars, with wolffish to be seen, an octopus and finished off with a great big anchor.

After we’d polished off our bacon sarnies and swapped cylinders the skipper was called away to an incident involving another group of divers, so we helped with other boats to collect divers and share O2 equipment.

We didn’t do a second dive so again that left lots of the day to wash down kit, eat ice-cream and fish & chips and have a gentle trip home. Another great weekend with a great bunch of people, fab weather and top boat.

Thanks to Gary and Divestay for a fabulous weekend.

When Gary, aka Great Uncle Bulgaria – the oldest and wisest of the Wimbledon Wombles and their leader, asked if anybody wanted to help clean the Glanmire wreck of rubbish, we wombles jumped at the chance. Little did we know that temperatures would plunge to below freezing and Angus, the first named storm of the year would be threatening us out in the North Sea. James,aka Tobermory – an engineer,  a skilled inventor, and avid diver tooled himself up with a variety of cutting implements and was chomping at the bit to get started on the clean up. He excitedly told us of his vast array of lift bags and clips as we planned our operation in Oblos on Friday night.
Sadly Jake, aka Orinoco – who loves sleep and food, was snowed in and didn’t make the first dive on Saturday so there was plenty of room on deck and we braced the -3 degrees and set out as the sun came up over the cliffs.

Chris, aka Tomsk – an athletic Womble, discovered that ‘slack’ doesn’t always mean slack and reappeared at the surface puffing and panting, with tales of endurance and exhaustion. He must have been delerious because he kept mentioning something about a train.

It turns out that wombling at 32m in the dark with a raging current is quite tiring and shortly every body was back onboard , empty handed and empty tanked.

Dive two was more successful and shortly after descending James sent up a lift bag. Attached was a mere tonne of tangled rope which took four of us to haul on board. This manoeuvre was expertly executed by Douggie, the toughest and most agile 73 year old I know. We were momentarily concerned that James was in fact wrapped up inside but it turned out to be just a couple of gasping fish which we duly rescued.

By 8.30 pm we were all fed and watered and ready for bed, thanks to the early start, and everybody had turned in by 9pm! (Good little wombles).

Uncle Bulgaria was really looking after us and on Sunday morning we were greeted by a radiator festooned with warm, dry, gloves. This was a bonus seeing as it was so cold the mask bucket had frozen solid and we had to salt the deck! Liz , Andy and Chris opted for a dive on Anemone Gullies, and enjoyed 55 mins of exploration, flat fish and lobbies whilst down on the wreck some serious wombling was going on! Tim and James launched several creels to the surface, whilst Bob and Tom sensibly kept their distance. Luckily all wombling bags and divers made it safely back on board and enjoyed hot coffee and an odd biscuit or two to warm through.

Following the fourth and final dive we arrived back in Eyemouth harbour to unload our wombling haul, which was actually quite impressive (see photo) and we celebrated with a ‘healthy portion’ of fish and chips.

Learning points of the weekend:

1. Tides are unpredictable.

2. It’s bloomin’ cold in November in Scotland.

3. Pruning saws are not that effective on rope under water.

4. An 18l cylinder is not such a daft idea.

5. An empty twinset is very bouyant.

Thanks Gary and Zoe for the usual hospitality, and to all the junior wombles for making it a great wreck wombling weekend.