Day 0 – 01/11/2024
Departing from the Sports hub at approx 14:30 to arrive at our accommodation in Lindisfarne (20 minutes from the harbour) by 20:30, giving us plenty of time for some card games, a quick trip to the pub for some of the group and some slightly questionable dinner choices by a few members of the group.
Day 1 – 02/11/2024
We arrived at Seahouses Harbour nice and early – around 9am with a 10am ropes off. Immediately upon setting foot on the boat one of our group decided they didn’t like their mask anymore and dropped it into the harbour 🙁 We shared the quite large boat with a group of about 10 or so other divers however there was plenty of space on the boat for everyone to kit up, dekit and have a cup of tea/coffee on the surface interval.
Conditions on the way out were sporting, this lead me to be violently sick over the side about 10 minutes before dropping into the water, this did seem to fix my seasickness for the rest of the trip much to the dismay of the rest of the group who were enjoying their peace and quiet.
Dive 1:
We found that due to low water there were minimal seals around the edges of the rock that seemed to be keen to jump in with us, we decided to do a nice wall dive along a reef.
There a decent amount of life on this dive, plenty of starfish, urchins and small fish made the dive a decent substitute for seals. We reached a maximum depth of 19.8m ascending gradually along the wall to about 12m where we sent up a DSMB and were then promptly collected by the boat.
Dive 2:
Moving down to a site closer to the south of the islands we had probably the best dive of the trip in terms of seal encounters, for those that got close enough to the shore.. oops. Everyone seemed to have a great dive in terms of getting up close to the seals, one of our group even decided to go for a snorkel :0
Day 2 – 03/11/2024
The second and last day of the trip, the sea was significantly calmer than on day 1. Unfortunately the seals seemed to be more standoffish than the previous day, swimming up to investigate us then turning around and swimming away.
Dive 3:
We decided to try going on a bit of wreckage for dive one of the day, from this we took a bearing directly west to end up at a wall, keeping the wall on the left handside we gradually ascended to a depth of around 5-7m, achieving a max depth of 19.5m and a dive time of 52 minutes we called it quits after spending about 30 minutes in the shallows looking around for seals. We saw a fair few seals in the shallows, they’d swim up to us, have a look and then turn around and swim off. At one point I did notice a tugging on my fins however this turned out to be Ben with his regulator out having a little bite.
Dive 4:
Dropping in the same spot as the second dive on day one we saw quite a few seals again. They were a little more standoffish and didn’t really come up quite as close as the previous day but still made for pretty good encounters.
Overall this was quite a good first trip in the UK for qutie a few of our members, their first time using drysuits and they got to see seals whilst they were at it. We will definitely be running another Farne Islands trip next year.
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