Always expect the unexpected.

[Cyprian]

By far the best day of the summer here on the Llyn Peninsula and I got to go diving! I'd already taken two divers out for a drift dive over the Tripods to the south of Maen Mellt when we picked up another seven club members to dive a reef out of Porth Colmon on high water slack. The two previously dived divers were coxwaining both the ribs, so it would mean that all of us would get down in one wave.

It turned out to be my turn to take one of the newly qualified ocean diver, who had a high air consumption rate, for a bimble, also a Padi crossover ocean diver joined us to make up a threesome. Anyway, we kitted up and rolled off the side down to 14m on what looked to be an interesting bed on the sonar.

We landed almost on top of a docile bull huss, one of the largest that I've ever seen, and for some reason they have been abundant in these waters of late. A few fin strokes and air checks later we came across a couple of squat lobsters, rarely seen around these coasts, and again plenty of their larger cousins were seen amongst the gullies. Then for the next 10 minutes we saw almost nothing except the odd brown and spider crabs, a few fish and sea urchins. Trying to be enthusiastic pointing these out to the nqod was becoming somewhat of a chore. But then I heard it, that unmissable clicking noise, I'd heard it before but had never seen one in it's natural habitat, so I turned the torch on and started scanning - and there he was, my first crawfish in a 106 dives. A quick guesstimate of his length, was from head to tail was in excess of 20 inches, he was huge. But trying to convey that the nqod had seen something spectacular was proving not to be an easy task. Upon returning to the surface, after only a half hour dive, the nqod asked what had happened to the lobsters' claws as she thought they were tiny! After I explained, she seemed slightly more enthusiastic, but she was more concerned with the fact that her air had lasted slightly longer than her previous dives.

It just goes to prove that you should always expect the unexpected, and that by doing your 'bit' for the club, you may get more in return than a short, half hour dive.

Irfon