Stockevik 5/4 2020 Brace yourselves, spring is here

Hi and ho!

Due to the situation of COVID -19, it was decided that the practical segments of the CMAS ** course are to wait a little bit. So instead it is back to normal diving for a while again.

Long legged spider crab (Macropoda rostrata), Not a real spider, even if there are "sea spiders" too

This weekend, me and my buddies decided to try out a new spot, the Fisheries-harbour of Stockevik, which is located outside of our regular haunts in Gullmarn.
When we got there, we did some form filling as well as readied our gear. Today i had only planned for one dive, as had the buddy who i rode in the car with.

Dive 1:
Depth: 13 m. Time: 28 min. Temp: 7 °C

The very common Bernhards hermit crab (Pagurus berhardus)
a species you see almost every dive

Me and my buddy went down on the inside of the harbour in order to first test the weighting of my buddy, as well as making it easier to lower down my camera rig. All went well during the first part and we descended and began swimming around the pier towards the outside. The previous dive pair had told us that the visibility was "bad to terrible", BAH! lies and humbug i say! the visibility was quite ok, with about 5 m range of visibility, even down deeper. During this dive i observed that hermit crabs and masking crabs were in abundance. The masking crabs especially were interesting as i have not seen "masked" masking crabs in a long time while diving. As we neared the 15 min mark, Something happened to the inflator hose on my buddy's BCD and it began to spew bubbles. We tried to disconnect and reconect the hose, but to no avail, so we decided to stop the dive and begin the ascension towards the surface. As we stopped on our safety stop, i decided to shoot my SMB in order to train for more "real situations" when that is needed. As the water is cold i know from experience that trying to inflate it with the mouth is not going to work, so instead i used the inflator hose of my suit.
 When we got up and got a good look at it, we discovered that the O-ring of the inflator had somehow broken, which would explain why the bubbles suddenly started coming there.

A small Frilled anemone (Metridium senile)

When second dive pair was done, we all sat down chatting and warm drinks while enjoying the nice spring sun and weather

All in all this was a very nice dive day!

So until next time, Keep on swimming!

It can be hard to spot Lyre crabs (Hyas spp) unless one has an eye for them