Connemara Trip For PADI Open Water

This weekend I was in Connemara at the brilliant Scubadive West. It's an excellent dive centre at Killary fjord. The facilities are mostly first class, though the toilets could do with being a little less smelly. A minor gripe.

I had three wonderful dives while I was there but there were some issues. Visibility got progressively worse throughout. Our first dive I thought was great, visibility wasn't great until we got to the bottom and then it was pretty clear. We saw some very interesting things, such as a starfish eating a medium sized crap with a large crab looking like it was waiting for us to move on before it jumped in. We also saw a large clam flapping around, I hadn't realised they did that. I just thought they moved with the current but I guess not. There were lots of crabs, hermit crabs and all kinds of creatures, although no fish where we were.

The second dive was pretty late and it was starting to get dark. Towards the end it was almost a night dive. Thankfully someone had brought a torch so we could see each other better.

The next day, conditions were more pleasant in that the water was about 1 degree warmer and there was less chop. Visibility though was very bad, it was hard to see each other. By the time our 4th dive came up, visibility was dangerously bad and we decided to postpone our dive to another weekend. That's a shame because we were supposed to be going to see a shallow wreck at about 14m.

So, we are still not PADI open water certified and will have to wait another few weeks. The good news is that our instructor said he will give us two dives in a few weeks to make up for it.

Our BCD's worked brilliantly and I am very happy with my purchase of the Seacsub Guru. We had to put 16kg of weights, twice what we had in the canaries because we were wearing so much neoprene. My own cheap Pegaso wetsuit from Lidl worked perfectly. It's 6.5mm full wetsuit and a 6mm shorty but the hood was a little restrictive and hurt my jaw. In fact, every single muscle in my body was hurting yesterday and still is. Even my finger muscles hurt. Scuba diving might be a sedate sport once in the water but you certainly get a great workout donning equipment and moving about on land before you get in the water. My boots don't have a zip and were hard to get on and impossible to get off until someone told me about the shampoo trick. That made it very quick and easy. You just put shampoo on your feet and or boots. Simple little trick that works very well. I applied that principal it to my arms in order to have my wetsuit slide on a little easier. 

I didn't bring my GoPro on the first dive so I could pay attention to my instructor but there was no point on the following dives because visibility was so bad so I got no underwater pictures I'm afraid.