Thanks to Gordon for organising an excellent dive weekend based at Tralee Bay (see map) near Oban last weekend (6th-9th May 2011). Eleven of us from the MCS and Preston Sub-Aqua Club enjoyed some spectacular dives.

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These including a fast run through the Creran Narrows, which Jo and I followed with a linked dive into an eddy pool by the North West shore, to get some better photos of the brittle star beds there, (it never ceases to amaze me how much colour there is in these beds, which appear from a distance to be rather unpleasant grey cob-webby places) before a rather hard swim back on the surface.

We also visited the wormery – where the serpulid reefs seem more substantial than ever – less substantial reefs are also to be found in the inner basin of Loch Creran.

Our final dive though was at Galanach, where I wanted to visit the sea-pen beds, with the intention of getting some better photos. As a rather nice bonus, however, I saw a large thorn-backed ray, which hung about long enough for me to get his mug-shot!

We also managed a small amount of microscopy, looking at a single plankton sample from Galanach. Unfortunately the phytoplankton have now disappeared (they formed a substantial component of the samples at Lochaline last month), though there is a large amount of zoo-plankton, with copepods and barnacle larvae (cyprids) as the major component.