A New Diving Season

As usual, we started the dive season off with a couple of dives around the Diving board in Lough Owel. This is a great local site for getting trainees accostomed to the basics of diving and figuring out how to get into and out of the boat. Although it’s pretty shallow, this is the nicest site I’ve dived in Lough Owel with a variety of a rocky bottom changing to mud and weed. Generally there’s not a lot of life with the exception of the occasional freshwater crayfish, a few small fist and if you’re really lucky you might see the odd perch or pike.

Our first dive here this year was on April 16th and I had the privilege of accompanying a trainee on her first open water dive. This is one thing I love about diving with a club as it is such a great experience to share a person’s first joy in their first proper dive. The dive was pretty uneventful except that I found a cheap pair of sunglasses. There is a problem where with crayfish plague and we saw a lot of dead crayfish and only one live one. We finsihed up a 4 metre dive after around 20 minutes as there was not a lot of variety and I didn’t want us getting cold fiven the water temperature of 9 degrees.

I went again the following week on April 23rd and this time it was my son’s first Open Water dive. I was so excited to get to do the first dive with him and we had an uneventful dive. It was important to get this done so he wouldn’t have to figure out how to get on and off the RIB at sea where he would have to deal with swell and currents.

So that was my first two dives for the season. Pretty unexciting stuff but it’s great to get back into open water after a long cold winter where the only diving action was on searches.