Smögen 25/4 Boat dives in the nice spring weather

Hi and ho!

Not one of the big Frilled anemones i saw, but got a nice picture nonetheless

This weekend me and my buddies decided to go to a very popular dive shop in Smögen, which is a bit further north from our usual diving area, in order to do boat dives in the archipelago. The weather forecast told of a nice sunny day, with a little bit of wind from the north.
When we had arrived, written ourselves up for the boat, and prepared our gear, it was time to go out to the first dive spot.

Dive 1: Stora Håskär.
Depth: 29 m, Temp: 10 °C, Time: 44 min.

We descended in a orderly fashion, until we reached the bottom at about 10 m, we then followed the bottom downwards to the maximum depth. We swam around for a bit, photographing and looking around, after a while, it became time to get up again, so we began the ascension. As we ascended, we got a bit lost and had to do a "free water" ascension due to me starting to run low on gas. Well, it was good training at least. During this dive i saw some very huge frilled anemones, some Red cushion stars and a lot of Dead mans finger corals among other things.
We got back into the boat and drove back to the dive center for lunch and surface intervals

Red cushion stars (Porania pulvillus) sure looks like some kind of plushie

Dive 2: Pesa.
Depth 18 m, Temp 10 °C, Time 49 min.

After a good surface interval with lunch and ice cream, we got back into the boat and drove out to the second dive site of the day.

The small Goniodoris nodosa was hard to spot among the kelp

Me and my buddy decided to go a bit more shallow on this dive in order to search for nudibranches. Said and done, we descended into a small crevice and followed it for a while before we got out to some walls, we descended a bit more when we got out of the crevice and began swimming towards the left, following the wall. As we swam, my buddy suddenly signaled me to look at something, as i got closer i realized it was a Lumpfish, Thus i stayed at the spot for a bit trying to photograph it. The lumpfish was shy for a bit, but then it suddenly started to swim up in our faces and underneath us when we just lay there, even as we kept blowing bubbles, which will usually cause fish to flee. After a while we decided to keep swimming and look for other stuff (and the lumpfish kept following us for a bit), we swam in the direction the compass took us (and if i have to be honest, i suck att following compass directions) After a while i decided that it was time to end the dive as i wanted good margins for surfacing time. So we followed a wall up until the safety stop. At the safety stop, i decided to train a bit at shooting my Surface marker buoy, and this time it wen rather well.

All in all it was a super nice diving trip

So until next time, Keep on swimming!

This Lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus) was shy at first, then it got all up in our faces and wouldn't leave us alone