Exiting the boat

The moon, planets and weather aligned and allowed our dive club, for the first time in many many years, to launch our boat from Dundee to get out and dive the Bell Rock Lighthouse.

It's 18miles straight out into the north sea, from our launch site at Broughty Ferry. The weather has to be exceptionally calm to get that far off shore in our 5.5m RIB.

It doesn't take long to loose sight of the coast, low grey cloud, some rain and almost flat calm. We had seals and dolphins along for the long ride out.

I have many un-inspiring pictures of the very inspiring Bell Rock lighthouse; over 200 years old and still completely functional, but today's blip is a rather regular diving photo; a diver rolling of the RIB at the start of the dive. See my previous archived blip of the diving the same lighthouse.

We dived the wreckage of the HMS Argyll, a British battle cruiser which ran aground here in 1915; 4 huge boilers standing pround of the shallow sea bed and surrounded by metal wreckage covered in sea life.

It just so happened that another dive boat was also there, and there happened to be blippers on board (3 I think) and my original dive instructor. Saddly, when we went over to the other dive boat to say hello, Sailfish and cyclops were already under the water and we missed them all.

We had just one dive there as we went to have another attempt at an unknown wreck we'd tried to dive 2 weeks ago half way between the Bell Rock and Dundee. We tried twice to dive it but the feroucious currants beat us back on both attempts.