It was the start of our Doing It Weekend to The Farne Islands, and the sun was just starting to rise over the harbour in Seahouses, and with the time just after 6am the first group of divers started to appear. The day before had been a long drive up, to The Farne Islands, from the Midlands, but by now that was a distant memory, and anticipation and excitement had taken over. In fact for some the pre-evening had been very pleasant, and comfortable, unless like Tom from our Solihull Store you had arrived very late and had to sleep in your car (Oooops !).

The tangle of ropes criss crossing the harbour, made getting our gear onto the boat an interesting affair, but of course there is nothing like a game of limbo in the morning to shake you awake. Eventually one of the crew did turn up and remove the offending rope, but not before Instructor Mark Carter almost took a dip, as he chucked his gear on-board.

With all the names ticked off on the list and the skipper on board we headed off in search of the famous Farne Island Seals. The Farne Islands area has quite a bad reputation for weather but luckily for us the weather did not resemble a scene from the perfect storm, so there were no green faces this on this occasion (for a change). On the way out we asked the skipper for several things, number one – Seals and number two – no current, and just for good measure, number three – some more seals. Watch this space for the answer on our requests ?!? 

As we arrived at the dive site we completed Dive Briefs and Buddied Up, then turned to the stern of the boat. Oooooh that’s a long way down, was the collective thought, but after the first few survived the plummet, we all followed suit and found out it wasn’t that bad really. Once descending we found out that there was, in fact, quite a lot of current (which became a running joke, excuse the pun), and proceeded with our planed dive. A few seals came to have a look at us but none seemed to be in too much of a playful mood on this dive, this however was made up by the large number of crabs, lobsters and wrasse in and around the kelp and some amazing rock formations.

Once safely back on the boat after the dive we had a quick rest bite then headed for the next dive which was said to be the wreck of the St Andrea and after further probing of the captain on the history of we found that nobody had any idea where it had come from, where it was going or what it was carrying ! All that was left were two great boilers. These great hunks had made themselves home to many fish, crabs and also some eels. After investigating these man made fish-homes, we swam swam out to the pinnacles, and they were absolutely swarming with Wrasse and Sea Urchins.

The next day we had a few new divers with us in the form of the Hyatts who had been on one of our other boats the day before, and had seen loads of seals. So now we had one mission for today, find Seals, after all there are over 4000 here in the Farne Islands, somewhere ! The first dive was not as good as we hoped with only a few seals, but the last dive was what we had all been waiting for, as by half way through the dive most of us had already had more than one Seal munching on our fins and SMB’s. We had actually seen older pictures of them biting on peoples arms, but by the looks of there teeth no one wanted them clamped on to them.

After early starts and a long long drive up, we were all pretty tired, but with smiles on our faces and bite-marks in our fins, we were all really happy with our Doing It Weekend in The Farne Islands.