St. John's Point, Co. Donegal
Author: jem@rte.ie

I have just returned from a rather extended weekend dive trip to St. John's Point in Co. Donegal. This is in the North-West of Ireland. Anyway, we did manage to get a lot of shore diving over the weekend. There were a lot of dolpins about but unfortunately none of them were within finning distance of the shore. I ended up logging 14 dives over three days, which is completely amazing for the group of people I was diving with. My girlfriend, Jo was also finishing off her training this weekend, so I now have a constant diving buddy. The surface temperature for the weekend varied between 15 and 19 degrees Celsius. Friday We arrived at the dive site at about 3 pm. to find ourselves the first by a considerable margin. As there were a few divers around I kitted up and managed a quick dive to 22 metres along Portnagh rock, which is a nice rock reef, which will give about 25 metres on a high tide. The visibility was pretty good at 12 m, which set the scene for the weekend. Life was plentiful with lots of Wrasse, Crabs, Mackerel, Lobster and Squat Lobster. We made this a short one as one of the people I was diving with was a trainee and went through a 12 litre cylinder in 25 minutes. By the time I got ashore and dried off, I contacted somebody from our group who informed me that they were about 15 minutes away. They arrived and after a surface interval of 90 minutes two of us embarked on a circuit of Skuddagh rock, which turned out to be a slightly longer fin than, anticipated. Life was again very plentiful with an abundance of Hermit crabs. We got 21 metres on this dive for 39 minutes.

Saturday We started out on Saturday with a deep dive to set the scene. We got a depth of 29.3 for about 5 minutes and swam back along the reef for a total of 38 minutes on the dive. Again the life was fantastic and visibility was almost 20 metres as we were about 2 hours after the high tide. This was an amazing dive. I lead the next dive in a different location. Apart from me, we had four relative novices. This was a long fin around a sandy bottom. We got 14.5 minutes for 32 minutes, and I surfaced about 300 metres from shore to give everybody a bit of finning practice. The visibility was very poor at times as some of the group were stirring the bottom a bit. A good experience dive for the novices. I followed this by helping out the instructor on three training dives. These were nothing special, but I had to accompany a girl with sticky ears in mid-way through one of them. After all of this, I was a bit tired, but we had a high tide at 8pm and it was flat calm, so I couldn't refuse a night dive. We set up strobes on the exit point, made contact arrangements and went for a fantastic 20-metre dive on Skuddagh rock. This was fantastic. There were three of us on the dive and we saw loads of crabs, and a few prawns. This was one of those awesome night dives. It was also my deepest night dive by a fair margin. This made for a total of six dives for one day, which for me is a personal record.

Sunday I started out Sunday a bit stiff, but soon limbered up as I started out on another dive on Portnagh rock. The instructor asked me to take a novice in on a 20-metre dive to allow him to build up a bit of confidence. I lead him and another reasonably experience diver on this dip. This was a pretty nice dive, but the fish seemed to have been out partying on Saturday night, as there were not many of them around. All went well, although the novice was a bit heavy on air as I could only persuade him to leave 12 of his 48 pounds of lead on the shore. When we returned the rest of the crew had arrived, although some of them were a little hung-over. We managed to get a foursome together for a 28.5 metre dive. This was another exceptional dive with a long gradual ascent. After this I was feeling a little tired so I decided on a slightly extended surface interval of about 3 hours. The next dive was arguably the best of the weekend. We dropped in off some rocks and spent 60 minutes finning about 400 metres around a headland onto a rocky beach. The highlight of this dive was seeing a pipefish. We also had numerous crabs and lobster to play with. It is such a pity that it is illegal to take crustaceans with SCUBA in Ireland. The final dive of the day was an exploratory effort to see what lay further out along the same area. I was not very comfortable on this dive as I completely lost my sense of direction while navigating. The others told me it was fine and we did make it back to the entry point after I handed the navigation to somebody else, but it was still pretty uncomfortable.

Monday We all woke up very stiff on Monday morning. We started out on another deep dip and managed 30.1 metres for the deepest of the weekend. Again, I was leading this one. We ended up spending 15 minutes at depth, which was a bit more than anticipated, as we had a reasonably inexperienced person with us. I turned the return into a nice wall dive half way up along Portnagh rock, which was a nice way to decompress a bit. The final dive of the day and off the weekend was an 18-metre parting cruise along Portnagh rock. As she had now completed her training dives, Jo decided to come with us, so this was a nice experience for me. I would have preferred not to, but as the only other experienced diver on the foursome was reluctant to lead the dive, I ended up leading again. We took it very easy on this dive and got 16.5 metres for 30 minutes. That was it for the day and we all headed off home very happy.