PLOCKTON Trip 2011

SQSAC Plockton Weekend – 27th – 30th October 2011

Six divers from SQSAC headed up to Plockton with the club RIB for a late season long weekend to dive the area around Loch Alsh, Loch Duich and Loch Carron.

Lorna and Gavin collected the boat from Ally’s house on Wednesday afternoon. Warren, Nathan and Kirsty set off later from Edinburgh and met us at Plockton Bunkhouse, our base for the trip. This proved to be perfectly adequate with comfortable rooms and a well-equipped kitchen, but with rather limited parking (glad we only took one boat!). Fortunately, extra parking is available 150yards away, by the station. Our sixth diver, Will, joined us on Saturday for the weekend only.

Thursday – Port Napier
We set off on Thursday morning with the plan of launching at Stromeferry slip and diving in Loch Carron, but ended up being diverted to Kyle of Lochalsh by roadworks that closed all access between Plockton and Stromeferry! As we had spring tides to contend with and a narrow slack water window in Loch Carron, it was decided to switch plans for the day and dive the wreck of the Port Napier instead.

After preparing and launching the boat at the old ferry slip at Kyle, we made the short passage over to the site and carefully located the wreck on the sounder, as she lies in propeller-bending depth just under the surface at high tide. The Port Napier was a 500ft WWII mine-layer of almost 10,000 tons. She caught fire in 1940 in Kyle with a full cargo of mines and was heroically towed away from the town before she exploded and sank. Today she lies on her starboard side in a maximum depth of 20m, with her port side breaking the surface at low tide.

We all enjoyed two fantastic dives on the wreck, dropping in on a shotline made from a sofnolime can that someone had kindly left tied to the crow’s nest on the forward mast. With visibility around 10m, the bow was a particularly impressive sight, complete with railings and 4 inch guns. The deck and superstructure are still in very good condition, and the wreck attracts plenty of sealife. It is possible to penetrate quite far inside as there are many entry and exit points, and much of the port side has been salvaged, allowing plenty of daylight into the hull.

The wreck was gradually revealed by the falling tide - this is part of the stern

On our first dive, we made our way aft from the bow after investigating the anchor hawse, railings, vents (and guns of course), and then followed the deck and superstructure all the way to the stern. There was enough time to explore the railway system for launching mines a short way into the stern before popping out for a look at the propshafts and rudders.

On our second dive, we entered the hull just aft of the deck gun through a hatch near the seabed and pretty much swam the length of the wreck between decks, weaving in and out through old doors and hatches to the stern, before doubling back and poking around midships up to our safety stop.

Massive sections of the superstructure were blown about half a mile to the shore when she exploded

One thing the harbour master told us to watch out for was the glass-bottomed boat that takes tourists from Kyle to see the wreck. We can confirm that the skipper completely ignored our dive flag, and tore around far too close to our boat while we had divers in the water.

During the summer, there is a pontoon by the slip in Kyle where it is possible to tie the boat up for the night. This had been removed for the winter, and in any case we were planning to try again for Loch Carron the next day, so we recovered the boat at Kyle and towed it back to Plockton. Warren and Nathan drove the cylinders over to Lochcarron village where Dave Black from 5 Bells was doing our air fills, while we made a massive pot of chilli for dinner at the hostel and opened a bottle of wine to celebrate my 500th dive :-)

Friday – Loch Carron
We set off in good time to negotiate the diversion via Kyle and launched the RIB at the famous Stromeferry in Loch Carron (see below).

After organising the boat, we initially headed west through Strome Narrows (noting the impressive tidal streams!) into Loch Reraig and pinged a pinnacle that looked promising on the chart at position 57°21.472’N, 5°37.519’W. We did locate this feature, but the weather was deteriorating so we sought shelter back in Loch Carron instead and searched for a deep wall charted on the East side of the loch around 57°22.278’N, 5°30.162’W.

After a fairly extensive search of this area we could find no sign of a wall on the sounder and ended up diving a rocky slope, which was pleasant enough with feather stars, squat lobsters and the usual sea loch life. Ridley also failed to locate a wall here, so its probably worth trying the dives further up the loch at the avalanche shelter in future. We also were slightly disappointed to find no trace of the pod of dolphins that are reported to hang around the fish cages further up the loch. Maybe they are only summer visitors?

We planned a drift through Strome narrows for our second dive, but after witnessing the power of the currents and eddies mid tide earlier in the day I tried to time our dives for nearer low water slack. However, the tide was pretty gentle by the time we were in the water, so I won’t be quite so cautious next time! We dropped in East of the slip at North Strome and drifted gently along a wall covered in soft corals and feather stars then over beautiful dense beds of purple mearl grazed by large sunstars. The tide then turned and we reversed direction and drifted through shoals of fish onto a sandy area peppered with dogfish where we bagged a nice catch of scallops, before surfacing near where we had started. This was a great dive, with viz well in excess of 10m and definitely a site I’d like to return to.

The slips on both sides at Strome were a long way out the water at low tide on springs (and the bottom half was covered in a thick layer of seaweed) so we moored the boat and went to the hotel in Lochcarron for dinner while Dave filled our tanks. I then had the pleasure of a night snorkel back out to the boat to fetch it back from the mooring once the tide had come in, illuminated by a friendly local on the shore with a massive hunting lamp of some sort. The brakes on our Skoda were playing up, so Warren kindly towed the boat back to Plockton after we had a dodgy moment with the hitch lock on the trailer jamming.
 
The slip with cars disembarking from the old ferry

Saturday – Loch Duich and Loch Alsh
Will had now joined us, so all 6 of us headed off to Dornie and launched the RIB at the old ferry slip on the East side, before zipping off under the bridge and past Eilean Donan castle, a great view from the water.

Warren and Nathan in Loch Duich, with Eilean Donan castle in the background

There are a series of walls charted down the east side of this loch, some of which drop off to 115m! One of these can be dived from the shore, and is listed in a recent dive guidebook as “a landscape of staggering cliff walls plummeting down to nearly undiveable depths… carpeted in peackock worms, squirts, sponges and dead mens fingers… a dive of special caliber.”

Needless to say we were very keen to try this site, but we found it a slightly disappointing dive. We did locate a series of walls underwater but they were rather barren of life, although they were bathed in a pleasant golden hue by the colour of the water here. Maybe we were too late in the season for the fish and other life that other divers have reported here.

We tied up at the other slip on west side of Dornie for lunch and to use the toilet facilities in the hall. Although we were told that this slip is suitable for launching, I was glad we hadn’t tried it as the surface is made of huge cobbles with large gaps between and is very slippy – it was difficult to walk on and we would have had no chance of getting Warren’s Jeep up and down.

After lunch, Nathan tried a high-speed snorkel under the bridge at Dornie (the currents are crazy here!) before we picked him up in the boat and headed west into Loch Alsh. There are many potential dives in this area if you have a boat at your disposal, and only a few of them have been reported in the guides.

Warren and Will dived Nostie Bank 57°16.225’N, 5°33.209’W, a large feature that rises from 40m up to about 10m in the middle of Loch Alsh about 1.5nm west of Eilean Donan. This turned out to be rather barren and silty, despite sitting in a fair current. There were lots of scallops, and a John Dory if I remember correctly but it wasn’t a site worthy of further investigation (sorry guys!).

We had a quick look at Racoon rock on the NW side of Glas Eilean, but Nathan, Kirsty, Lorna and I instead opted to try diving a wall charted at Ru Sgarabhaig on the west side of Avernish at 57°16.304’N, 5°35.696’W. We found an excellent sheer wall here with lovely overhangs, covered in cup corals, sunstars, featherstars and sponges (Esperiopsis fucorum) with large conger eels and cuckoo wrasse hiding in the cracks. This site is very protected from the current, and hence the visibility wasn’t as good (about 4m) but it was a very atmospheric dive with lovely green light spilling down from above. It would be worth diving here again, and the wall goes much deeper than the 25m we made it to (it’s charted to about 40m, we couldn’t see the bottom).

Recovery was impossible at Dornie at low water so Nathan and I dropped off the divers and kit and had a fun ride on the RIB through some rough weather a few miles to Kyle of Lochalsh, where Warren and the others met us with the trailer. The old ferry slip here is huge, and extends far below the waterline even at low tide making it the only option on springs.