Hi and ho!
This weekend, we first decided upon one site, but in the car, on the way to the site, we decided to go to a site nearby instead, in order to get a bit of a change, as we have dived the first site quite a lot recently. Another reason for choosing this site, was that i know that there is great chance for seeing Norway king crabs this time of the year.
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| Harbour swimming crab with a rather peculiar carapace colour pattern |
Dive 1:
Depth: 25 m, Time: 41 min, Temp: 6 C
We jumped into the waters from the pier and swam out from there for a bit before deciding to descend. As we descended, we quickly realized that the surface visibility was completely garbage, brown and muddy, as it had been raining and snowing for quite a bit the night before. So we could barely see each other, even if we were rather close But as soon as we got to about 5-6 m depth, it cleared up, though it was pitch black in the water due to no sunlight reaching down (this was mid-day) and a lot of particles in the water. We followed the slope downwards and to the left of Hällebäck soon finding the wall. As we were following the slope, one of my buddies signalled for me to come and look at something, which turned out to be a swimming crab with a marbling I had not seen so far. So i spent some time to snap some photos to document it, and after getting home and consulting different sources, I identified it as a Harbour swimming crab with a rather uncommon carapace marbling. As we reached the wall, we followed it towards the left, looking for Norway king crabs and other critters of Gullmarsfjorden. And king crabs we did indeed find, three of them to be exact. After a little while, my buddies signalled to me that it was time to turn around and swim back towards the starting point. At about 15 m (I think), one of my buddies come up to me with a wing dump valve in their hand, after checking that it wasn't mine, I deduced that it was theirs, and that we had a bit of a smaller situation on hand, but we did continue in a relatively relaxed manner until we reached our safety stop. At the safety stop, the buddy that wasn't having a wing dump valve issue, signalled that they saw something, this something turned out to be a Norway king crab, and the shallowest observation of the species I've ever made. Unfortunately, Ii also managed to whip up an enormous silt cloud as I was turning around and trying to photograph it, so that was a thing too.
We surfaced at 41 min, got up and enjoyed warm chocolate in the somewhat nice weather.
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| One of the Norway king crabs |
Dive 2:
Depth: 25 m, Time: 41 min, Temp: 6 C
After a surface interval, we got ready to head out once more. After some searching for a lost fin in the shallows (and grumbling from me due to the extremely bad visibility) we started swimming out to about the same spot we went to on the previous dive before we descended. Not much to say about this dive really, as no big thing really happened, all went according to plan really. On this dive, I observed Redback sea slugs grazing on oaten pipe hydroids, as well as some more king crabs.
We surfaced at 42 minutes and got up to get ready to head home, but as we were getting out of our gear, it started snowing once more, and it was rather wet snow too
All in all, i am very satisfied with the dives this weekend.
So until next time! Keep on swimming!
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| Redback seaslug, a common species around this time of the year |
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