Loch Fyne

Last Sunday I was out again with the Dumfries Sub Aqua Club (some of my favourite people) to the prettiest sea loch I have ever been too, Loch Fyne.  There are a few more I have yet to visit . . . but this one is the prettiest so far.

This was taken from St Catherine (across the loch from Inverary) on the loch where we spent the day. 
Loch Fyne is a couple of hours north of Glasgow and I believe it is worth the loss of an extra hour of sleep to get there.

It was young Liam's first dive in open water.  We were excited for him!

There is some very good diving to be had.  Aside from one bump on the head and some body's equipment box breaking, there were no serious accidents.  For that we are grateful as there was a reminder in the form of a fading Christmas wreath on a tree at this site, that things can go wrong even when you follow all the safety rules. 

High spirits and excitement as we get things ready for the dive. 

I had a short and shallow dive in which I got to use my camera!  I was a happy girl. 

Squat lobster, red sea squirt and pink encrusting algae.

Sea urchin and more of that pink algae.  :-)

I don't know what it is about crabs, but the non-edible variety always want to have a go at me!

All out of the water in one piece at the end of the day.  

I've actually managed to get more dives in during the winter than over the summer.  Don't get me wrong, I prefer diving in the summer . . . but sometimes it just works out that way.  Thanks to the dive club for yet another fantastic day of diving.

A Grand Day Out

On Saturday, young George and I planned an outing to Edinburgh.  We were going to go to the zoo and see the penguins.   The great thing about going to the zoo in January is that it is practically EMPTY.  If you don't mind walking around in the cold (which we don't) you get to enjoy the zoo in relative peace.   As we travelled along the M8 toward Edinburgh, the big sign for Deep Sea World came into view.  

"George, it's decision time.  Deep Sea World or the zoo.  What do you want to do?"
"Deep Sea World!  Good call Mom!"

Ok, so we had an instant change of direction.   It takes us just as long to get to Deep Sea World in North Queensferry as it does to get to the zoo.   It is an indoor attraction, so naturally it was very crowded on a Saturday afternoon.


Under the Forth Bridge

 Deep Sea World is under one of the most beautiful bridges in the world, The Forth Bridge.



The Forth Road Bridge

 It is an elegant bridge and anytime I am driving across the The Forth Road Bridge (which I suspect was built so that we could have a better view of the rail bridge), I always want to stop, get out and feast my eyes.  Naturally, this would cause traffic chaos and I never do, but I think about it each and every time I drive over the Firth of Forth.

So, one of the benefits of visiting Deep Sea World in North Queensferry is the close proximity to beautiful Scottish engineering.  

It was, as we suspected, a lot more crowded than the zoo would have been.  The first time we took George to Deep Sea World, he was about two years old.  he came down with chicken pox two weeks later.  It is a hazard of taking children into the wider world.  They not only get to see the world around them, but they also get exposed to infection!

The two of us had a lovely day and we did not get ill afterward.  We had arrived just in time to see them feeding the two resident harbor seals.  A mother and daughter who had been taught a few crowd pleasing tricks.

We saw one of our favourite fish, the Picasso Triggerfish - (Pacific version)

Malawi Cichlids

We saw a number of other tropical fish that we have seen in the wild during dive trips.  When I saw them, it felt like we were stopping by to see old friends.


Sand Tiger - Deep Sea World 


Naturally they have the big shark tank and that is fun.  The sand tiger shark with its rows of pointy fish nibbling teeth is the star of that show by virtue of its size.  I have become quite immune to the charms of big sharks in the tank.  True to form, I was quite happy looking at the little stuff.  I think the smaller dogfish is much prettier and more interesting.


Spotted dogfish

After seeing all, watching the seals and frogs getting fed we called time and drove home. 

If you live in Scotland - please visit Deep Sea World  - it is well worth the effort!

Loch Long

I was out with the most excellent Dumfries & Galloway Sub Aqua Club on Sunday.

We planned to go to Loch Long one of the west of Scotland's sea lochs in Argyle & Bute. 


Old pier - Loch Long

We planned to dive in a spot called Conger Alley on the loch.  This meant driving a little longer to get there so we met in the Whitesands car park in Dumfries an hour earlier than we normally do.

It is still quite dark at 07.30 but we all showed up on time.  We got our tanks and we were off!

As we drove north to our destination, I noted with glee that there wasn't a breath of wind, there was no snow (or fog) and the temperatures that had been quite low for some weeks had eased and it was a mild day.

It was a bit overcast but that did not detract from the stunning beauty of one of Scotland's prettiest sea lochs. 

The water temperature was at about 6 C.  That's not too bad but I prefer it to be a bit warmer.  The visibility was good.  The overcast conditions meant that the dive was rather dark.  As we got deeper, it got darker.

There were a few things to see - squat lobsters, crabs, tiny fish zipping back under rocks as we approached them.   I think if we were to do that dive again, I would stay shallow and poke around in the sea weed rather than to go deeper.



Dumfries divers

I tell you something - I had a really nice day out.  The scenery was beautiful, the weather was mild and these three gentlemen were the kindest, most helpful diving companions a gal could ask for.

Sadly, we didn't find Conger Alley, but it was dark and only one of us had ever been there before.  It is still there and we can always go back.  We still saw plenty of things that interest us.   I took my camera into the sea with me, but I didn't take any photos.  I will save that for another time when the light is a bit better.

Feeling Better - Let's Walk the Dog

We are turning the corner with the flu bug.  I'm working at about 78% capacity and thought the long suffering hound could really do with a nice long walk.

I bundled up and took her up the road to our favourite walk.  It snowed about an inch last night and I could see we were the first and only visitors to the pond today.  Well, the only domestic visitors . . .

There were some deer tracks.

By this little hill, I could see where some pheasants had been dragging their sleds around in the snow.

Then there was evidence of a fox.

 I got this shot of the fox's path through the snow before Polly could go and bounce all over the tracks and spoil it.

The fox had zig zagged all up and down the snowy lane looking for something, anything to eat.

This tree looked lacey with the snow still clinging to its branches.

I don't know if you can tell from this photo how quiet it was . . . . but I could only hear my footsteps and own breath.

Here's our pond.  It looks different all silent and frozen.  In a few months - this bit of water will be heaving with the activity of spring but for now, it is still.

This surprised me - the moles - blast their furry hides - are still active.  This mole hill at the side of the road was made fresh this morning.

Thank you Google Street View

As the Man of the Place and I mope around the house and swallow stuff that will make us feel better until this stupid virus is finished with us, I have been comforting myself with a bit of desktop travel.  

The place I have been going to lately is the dear State of North Dakota.  I find I can travel through most of the state on Google Street View.

I haven't been to North Dakota since about 1979 so there was bound to be change. I was ready for it.

I went to our old house, just outside Bismarck .  . .well it used to be just outside Bismarck.  It is most definitely in town now.   The road in front of the house used to be a dirt road that the county would oil in the summer to keep the dust down.  Can you imagine using oil in that manner now?  Times have changed and that dirt road is now an express way.    The fields around the house are now lovely houses, so I guess the gopher problem has been solved.

View Larger Map

Somethings have stayed the same though.   The majesty of the Dakota plains is still there.   There is still something spiritual to me about this landscape.  I may have said this before, I feel we imprint on the first landscapes we see as children and I certainly feel it when I see North Dakota on a late summer day through this new option on Google.
View Larger Map

It's a bison! Right there on the side of the road, eating grass!!!


I have been quite homesick for wide prairies, choke cherries and garter snakes.  I think it's the far horizons that I miss the most.  Where you stand on a hill and the sky seems like a big blue dome because there is nothing to block your view for 360 degrees.   I'm thankful that I can at least sneak a peek at these places without having to spend a small fortune to do it.

Perhaps it is my youth that I miss.  The tanned shins getting scratched running through the sagebrush and under the cottonwood trees.  I swear I can almost smell it.

I would love to see the state one more time, but I really don't know how feasible that will be.  I weighed it up in my head . . . . move back or stay here . . . . I would miss Scotland far more if I moved back.   There is also a family that has never known any home but this one.   I've been here so long that my roots have become permanent.  I'd probably not die if I were to leave, but I'd never be the same again and neither would they.  I wouldn't consider inflicting that pain on them.  That doesn't mean that from time to time, my eyes don't yearn to see some prairie (and naturally those dear folks I know who live there).

Hello North Dakota!

This is Not What I Had Planned

I was going to start the new year with tales of intrepid dives along the Irish Sea or possibly the North Sea depending on the direction of the wind . . .

New Year's Eve saw me calling things off because I was developing a deep cough.  It is forbidden to dive with a cough or plugged up nose.  It is way too dangerous for a delicate human body and definitely not worth any risk.

So, the first day of the new year saw me at home - sniffing, coughing and watching old movies and playing with my new camera and lovingly stroking the Ikelite underwater housing that showed up under the tree at the same time.  So, I have figured out zoom, delete, whitebalance (important for underwater photography), moving image, macro and a bunch of other features.

A few days on and I'm a little better but The Man of the Place has been struck down with this bug as well.  I'm phoning the doctor in the morning. 

When there are flu like symptoms the advice is to not go to the doctor, let him come to you. 

Just stay away . . . it isn't pleasant around here.

Farewell 2010

On the last day of the year, I took my dear sweet dog Polly on a walk.  It was foggy today and there might have been a pheasant shoot nearby so I put on a high viz vest and I put one on the dog.   I've got a new camera and I was keen to start using it.


Polly in the fog

I haven't been on our favourite walk in a while.  We've had lots of snow and very cold temperatures.  Now, the dog loves to play in the snow, but it has been too cold to go out.  It's the sort of cold where you feel your nose hairs freeze and snow squeaks.

Looking up our lane

A couple warmer days and some rain have made the snow go away.   We are now back to normal Scottish winters with fog, rain and generally dreich weather.   

The pond in the fog

There were plenty of pheasants up here today and a huge blue heron.  In the fog it looked like a pterodactyl!

I am headed to my bed early as I have a hacking cough.  I'll leave the rest of you to whoop it up and sing Auld Lang Syne. 

We've been at our home, Whitelees for almost 17 years now.  These trees were saplings when we first arrived.  I remember being careful not to step on them when in that field picking daisies.



The Trees have grown!

I was talking about this with the youngest member of the family we agreed that our life here is pretty fantastic.  We wouldn't live anywhere else.  I'm really looking forward to the next year! 

Some Photos of My Life So Far

Courtesy of Pummelvision

Whiskey Galore? Nope, just an animal medicine bottle

Where are we?

On Sunday some (rather stalwart) members of the Dumfries Subaqua Club went on a mission to find new dive sites.  We were looking for good entry points near sites where there are known to be shipwrecks.  We looked at a couple of different sites near Stranraer. 

Rodger looking out to sea

The first place to check was Corsewall Point.   There is a lovely lighthouse there.  It has been turned into a rather nice hotel.  I went in at one point to ask the hotelier some questions about access to the sea.  The answer confirmed what we had already guessed.  There isn't a really safe place to enter the water near the Lighthouse.  There is one spot with some sand - but it isn't close enough to the wreck site for us to swim to it safely.  We need a boat.



Corsewall Point

The reason we were looking at this point was that on the 26th August 1898 the ship Firth of Cromarty left Glasgow.  She was bound for Australia with over 2000 tons of general cargo and a large consignment of whisky.

Firth of Cromarty

The next day, the 27th August as she was clearing Corsewall Point at the top of the Rhinns of Galloway wind smashed her against the rocks.  The crew managed to escape to shore.  It is reported that it took another four days before a salvage party could get to the ship.  In the meantime much of her cargo, including the whisky, had been "washed ashore".

Nobody knows what became of the whisky but  local legend has it that that many local farmers were quite merry during the months following the wreck.

Gilchrist poison

I did find one bottle in the sand a few hundred meters south of the wreck site.  The mouth of the bottle has been broken and smoothed by the sea and the bottle filled with sand.   I pulled a few small limpets off the bottle and tossed those back into the sea.   The bottle is ribbed.  There is a smooth spot where a label used to be and pressed onto the glass is the word Gilchrist across the bottom and poison across the top.   I don't know how old the bottle is.  I doubt it is from 1898 . . . but it might be!   I've since been told that it is an animal medicine bottle.  I'll let you know if I get more information on it.



As there wasn't a spot at Corswell Point that we wanted to dive, we went to look at the alternative site, Lady Bay near Stranraer.

Lady Bay

The entry to Lady Bay can't be easier.  There are steps going from the parking area down to a gently sloping sandy beach.

Winter days are short so there wasn't any hanging about once the decision to dive this site was made.  Even though we were quick about getting in, we really only had enough light for a short dive.

The visibility was much better than the dive we had last week.  We could see almost two meters!  This meant that we weren't losing dive buddies and we could actually see some of the marine life.  There were some beautiful bright yellow Flat periwinkle shells the size of a child's fingernail and smaller still was the jewel like Blue Rayed Limpet. 

Blue Rayed Limpet

I had seen a photo of these in my field guide but I had never seen one of these in the wild.  They sure are pretty.



Sea hare



There were hundreds of Sea hare nudibranchs.  They are not overly spectacular compared to their garish cousins but these mud coloured nudibranchs are still fun to see.   There was even one on my back later when somebody was unzipping my dry suit.  Naturally I put the poor beast back into the water.

Dahlia anemone

One of the divers, Alex spotted this lovely dahlia anemone.

These creepy marine isopods were everywhere.  It was mentioned that they looked like those worms that were used in torture in an episode of Star Trek. . . . 

Isopod on kelp

I'm sure these little isopods are fine and won't find their way into our ears to nibble on our brains.

Peg face down in the sea

Here is me - making my way toward shore.  I am face down in the water for two reasons, there are huge rocks under the water in this spot and I didn't want to bash my knees against them and the most interesting stuff  to me is under the water's surface and I don't want to miss anything good!



Dumfries Subaqua Club



Here we are bobbing in the sea just as the sun is dipping below the horizon.

.

Diving in December!

Sunday, 5th of December was a cloudless, clear cold day here in Dumfries & Galloway.  There wasn't a breath of wind when five divers met in the Whitesands car park at 08.45.   After collecting our tanks at DG1 we were off for Dundrennan and one of the prettiest, most secluded spots on the Dumfriesshire coast.   We arrived just at 11.00 and high tide.   It was frosty, cold and beautiful. 


Robin Rigg Wind Farm

The views across The Solway Firth when we arrived were spectacular!   Not everybody likes this wind farm, but I love it!  I was happy to see it as I looked across to the snow covered foothills of The Lake District in Cumbria.   It seemed as though we could see for a thousand miles. 


The hills of The Lake District from across The Solway Firth



It was frosty, but next to the sea there is no snow.  I believe that the the Gulf Stream takes care of that for us.  It is such a friendly and obliging current.

This is me (black suit with yellow fins) and Alan getting into the water.  It isn't as easy as one would think.  There are large rocks just under the water's surface and if one is not graceful (like me) you will fall over in a humiliating manner. 

  

The water was still and calm.  Usually this means good visibility.  Sadly this was not the case on Sunday.

This photo of Nick, one of the  members of the club.   You can see how poor the visibility is even though this picture was taken near the surface.  Even with the low visibility some members of the dive club were able to find the a shipwreck that the guys were looking for, The Ludgate.

I was so happy to be diving.  I didn't care about cold or low visibility.  It was enough that I was in the water with the chance to look for little fish and seaweeds.  In the beam of my LED dive torch I saw the claws of a squat lobster poking out from under a rock.  In the time it took to look between the cracks of a rock and look up again, I had managed to get myself and Alan separated from the other three divers.  So sorry Alan.   

It was good that we had all reviewed separation procedures immediately before the dive.   We looked for 1 minute turning 360 degrees, went back the way we came for a minute, looked again for another minute and surfaced.  When on the surface, we looked for the other divers or their bubbles.  Oddly the glare on the smooth surface of the sea made it hard to see bubbles from the other divers.  We started to swim for shore when the rest of the party popped to the surface.    We re-grouped and thought we'd try again.  

My ears wouldn't equalize on the decent.  A mid-water decent is harder on ears than walking in from the shore.  I had to go up a few meters to get them to clear.  When my ears had cleared and I could go down again, I had lost my dive party completely!!  Crap!  I thought I could feel the current taking me a bit while I was clearing my ears.  I was disappointed that I had lost them a second time, but not surprised.  When I re-surfaced, I was already about half a kilometer from shore.   There is only one way to get to shore . . . swimming.   I rolled over onto my back and started kicking.  The sun was lovely and bright and it helped to keep my hands warm.  It took AGES to get to the shore and the current was insisting that I be on a different part of the shore.

While swimming toward shore by myself . . . thoughts of shark attacks crept into my brain.  It has only been a few days since the attacks in Egypt.  I forced myself not to think of that.  There is no point on dwelling on things outside ones control and focused instead on the stunning scenery.  I mean what else would I be doing on a cold Sunday anyway?  Laundry?  Christmas shopping?  Cleaning the bathroom?   Not long after I had started my swim to shore, two more divers popped up.  They had become separated and were following the same procedure I just did.  By the time we  made it to shore, all five of us were getting out of the water.  Again, some of them were much more graceful than I was.

We packed up and made our way to the The Old Smugglers Inn in Auchencairn to write up our log books and have a warm drink.  We ended up staying for lunch and a couple of games of pool. 

  

All in all, I had a wonderful day and I am very grateful to the members of the Dumfries and Galloway Subaqua Club for making it all possible.

Photos  by Rodger Donald

Last Rose of Summer

 This rose was given to me over 16 years ago by a friend that is sadly, no longer with us. It's a robust thing and though it only gives us two or three flowers per year, I keep it.  The flowers are beautiful when they show up and I always think of my friend Ettie.

uncared for tomatoes

It is now mid-November and the garden is a mess!  It was so tidy all spring and into the summer.  Things fell apart in July when I started the "bad job".  I left the house at about 07.30 each  morning and wouldn't get home until after six.  Sometimes I got home later still if there were things that needed to be done.  In any case, life at home started to suffer.  I wasn't here to do all the lovely things I had been doing up until then.  The garden suffered the most.

Broccoli left to go to seed

 

former pea nets and canes

 It wasn't looking too bad when my sister and her family visited in August. We harvested the peas while she was here. But now, in November when I have done nothing but ignore it, it looks BAD.

beans have gone to seed on the canes

 There are still some beans flapping in the breeze.  A few canes that were there for support are still standing.  At some point, I will take the canes down, wipe them off and put them in the greenhouse.   They'll last longer in there, out of the weather.

old cabbages - the ones that the caterpillars didn't eat

Poor old cabbages.  They look like skulls.  The only thing that is salvageable at this point are the leeks.  They can stay in until I am ready to use them.   

I'm not making any promises, but if we get a dry spell, I'll tidy this patch up and cover it with black plastic until spring. 

I was a mildly non-lazy gardener up until July but rest assured, I'm back on form now.  :-)