After a lazy morning recovering from the rigours of foreign travel (or the beer the night before in certain cases, no names eh Stuart), we were picked up from the apartments at 10.30 and taken the short distance to the harbour. Our boat was not back from an earlier dive and we had a few minutes wait under an overcast sky. This gave us a chance to choose a cylinder from the air truck parked just opposite the moorings.

Our boat arrived and a million divers disembarked in a reasonably short time. We were allocated one side of the boat and a group of Irish divers the other, so they were! The aft section was taken over by small groups of divers from Euroland.

The boat is operated as a shuttle and is well organised with plenty of deck space, benches, cylinder bungee and an overhead cargo net arrangement for dry and delicate items. This is always a benefit, particularly with Andrew on board. After a dive he seems to spurt water from a number of orifices and could easily be mistaken for a garden irrigation system. There is usually a necessary avoidance zone of a metre around him for quite some time after he emerges from the depths.

Everyone managed to get changed with various levels of hopping about with a leg either in or out of a pant before the boat moored in front of a channel between two rock pinnacles. The sky remained grey and there was a little drizzle in the air, the water looked dark and less than appealing, I was beginning to regret bringing the wet suit over the dry already.

The plan was to circumnavigate the right hand pinnacle and return to the boat through the channel. Off Sue and I went into about 12 m of freezing cold water, not wanting to be thought of a wuss and jump straight out again, we continued down the rock fall to find Andrew bothering a particularly fine specimen of octopus. The rock was quite sheer in places and the gorgonians hanging onto the sides were thick and spectacular. We came across plenty of other life including some tiny black Moray eels, wrasse and a school of tiny iridescent blue fish, which I will call tiny iridescent blue fish.

We continued around the pinnacle and found the cleft in the rock that signalled the start of the channel leading back to the boat but above a group of Grouper were effortlessly hovering in the current. However, we were not able to make much headway against this current where the channel narrowed and became shallow. We gave up and drifted back sending up a DSMB and making a perfect ascent to the surface and being collected by the RIB.

I got changed on the boat and despite having a fleece I was shivering and could not get warm as I had got really cold. Back at the apartment I had to take to my chambers and get wrapped up in bed for an hour to warm up.

Overall it was an enjoyable dive with plenty of colours in the clear water. The feeling of floating between towering cliffs and plunging chasms in clear water was unusual. I am sure that in brighter weather this dive would be even more colourful.