Menai Strait with friends
The plan was to dive so that the tide took us down the strait, turned and brought us back with the start time of 1100. However local information from the chaps that later caught a couple of very large lobsters suggested being in at 1045. The JBOD team sprang into action and were first into the water with two buddy pairs leaving Mark on surface cover duty (after dressing him properly in a warm coat and doing his laces up as he has a poorly shoulder). John and Alistair slowly descended through weed and quite poor visibility and soon lost sight of Alan and Adrian. They did catch sight of Maria in her fetching pink drysuit at one point though. As they descended the viz became better and soon they were bimbling around looking at all sorts of interesting wildlife. There were crabs, Tompots, lobster and shrimps by the dozen! One group of crabs were particularly interesting as we'd never seen anything like them before. As they returned back to the surface Alistair and John were both considering whether they'd found a species unknown to science and whether the JBOD crab or Crabby McCrabface was a suitable name. Upon discussion on the surface Maria identified the "unknown" species as Leach's crab.
Many thanks to Adrian for driving everyone to Menai, Chorley SAC for inviting us along and to everyone else for making it such a lovely day. Hopefully we'll see everyone in the water again soon.
