Anderson Reef, Abercastle, West wales

Sunday August 3rd


Arriving at the dive centre just after 9.00am, I ask Bruce the owner of the centre what was the plan for the day, the reply, diving, :) we take the rib down to the small harbour of Abercastle, the conditions are a little sloppy. We head of east and soon find a spot where the sea is protected by a number of small islets, the depth sounder is showing 16 meters, Bruce and Mark head down the anchor line as Ann and myself make ready to enter the water, making our way down the anchor line the vis is not the best at around 2 meters, once we reach the sea floor we head east until we come to a wall which is the start of a long gully, the vis improves to between 3 and 4 meters, the walls on each side of the gully are festooned with marine life, after around 100 meters the gully ends at the entrance to a cave, we would of had a poke around in there but the surge was a little strong so we turned and headed back down the gully taking in the marine life that decorated the wall.
After leaving the gully we had a quick look around the reef area before making our accent.

After lunch we headed out to Anderson reef, this was to be a drift dive along the reef, the current runs west to east, we drop down to the reef at 18 meters and started the drift, after 20 minutes we deployed the DSMB and carried on the dive starting our accent after a further 15 minutes, after surfacing we flopped back into the rib I looked around and the coast-line looked so different, I asked Mark how far we had drifted, it turned out that we had travelled over a mile and a half.

S ome of the species that we saw included elephant hide sponge, yellow hedgehog sponge, boring sponge, yellow stag horn sponge, deadmen’s fingers, snakes lock anemones, Devonshire cup corals, double spiral worm, candy striped flatworm, Ross worms, painted top shells, spiral bryozoans, pentapora (potato crisp bryozoan) bloody henrys, light bulb sea squirts, gooseberry sea squirts, rock cook, ballan wrasse, goldsinny, leopard spotted goby,

All in all a great days diving