Hi and ho!
Due to the weather forecast once more telling of bad weather this weekend, me and my buddies decided to go to a site with a roof over the changing area. As we also had a newer diver with us this time, we decided to go to Släggö, as this is a site that is easy to dive. When we arrived at Släggö, the rain was pouring down, but soon it started to subside, which was quite nice.
We set up our gear, divided into pairs and got ready for the dives.
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| Vibrant male of Common dragonet, truly one of the prettiest fishes on the Swedish west coast |
Dive 1:
Depth 27m, Time: 57 min, Temp: 9 °C
Me and my buddy jumped in and started swimming out from the pier before we deemed it far enough to do a descent. As we descended in a orderly fashion, we saw directly that there was a lot of jellyfish in the water, signalling that the jellyfish season had come. When we got a bit further, my buddy signalled that they were having problems equalizing, so we stayed at a certain depth for a bit as they equalized their ears. After they managed to get their ears equalized, we continued further down. at 11 m, we encountered a thermo-and halocline, where the waters suddenly got quite a bit colder. We followed the bottom, along the cliff and out over the soft bottom, finding the dive helmet once more. As we were nearing our NDL, my buddy signalled me to look at something, turned out to be a rather large male Common dragonet. I stopped to take some photos of it before signalling that we were to ascend and turn around, as the NDL had gotten pretty low, and that it was time to start swimming back. When we reached about 12 m depth on the way back, I looked around a little bit and saw that there was a veritable minefield of lion's mane jellies above us, which made me a bit concerned. As we were swimming back, we met the other buddy pair that was with us this day on the way out, turned out they had some weighting problems for the new person and thus took a while to get ready.
We surfaced at 57 minutes and got up to prepare for a nice surface intervall. At this point it had stopped raining too.
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| Moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) swimming into the light beam of my buddy. |
Dive 2:
Depth 27m, Time: 56 min, Temp: 9 °C
After a nice surface interval with pizza and relaxing, it was time for the second dive of the day. Me and my buddy swam out once more and descended close to the cliff. This dive the goal was to look for European lobsters, which meant we were to look among the rubble and in the crevices near the cliffs. We continued in a orderly fashion, descending while following the walls, looking in the crevices and underneath the rocks. The first lobster was really shy, and didn't quite show itself, with only the claws slightly visible from underneath the rock, I tried to just hang about for a bit, to wait it out, but that didn't work, so we continued further. The second lobster was one of heftier size, hiding away inside a crevice close to the deeper parts.
At about 25 minutes we turned around, as I deemed it appropriate to turn around at this time frame, we swam back, gas was starting to get to lower levels too, and I felt like i didn't want too much of a surface swim back (though it was ok really, just making sure that we had some gas to spare on the way back, as a safety thing). We surfaced at 56 minutes, got up and out of our gear, and prepared to go home after a nice dive day.
All in all, it was sure a nice day for diving, even if it began a bit on the wet side.
So until next time! Keep on swimming!
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| Lion's mane jellyfish, got my buddy to backlight this one, so we got this motif |
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