Photos, Lundy Island, UK, July 2008

These are some photographs from a joint expedition by Bath Sub-Aqua Club (BSAC 33) and Bath Dive Centre on Tuesday 16th July 2008. We chartered a hard boat out of Ilfracombe and made a 90 minute journey to Lundy Island in the mouth of the Bristol Channel. I buddied with Neil Lilly. Our first dive had been planned as a wreck dive but the skipper thought that conditions were a little too rough and diverted us to the Knoll Pins on the east side of the island. You can see the locations of local dive sites on the lundy.org website. Most of our dive was over 20m and my camera wasn't up to the low light levels.

Afterwards, we made our way to a bay with a colony of grey seals. We first snorkelled and later donned scuba gear to play with the seals. The seals had a habit of sneak up from behind you, and tugging on your fins. When snorkelling, I suddenly felt a tickling sensation on my hands and looking down was surprised to see a seal investigating my bare hands. I wasn't wearing gloves as the water was a cosy 17 degrees celcius. Later on scuba gear, Neil and I hunkered down in the kelp to wait for the young seals to come to us. I got quite few shots of close encounters for both Neil and myself. The dive was a truly magical occasion with great light from the Sun's rays through the shallow water.

Click on the itinerary dive names to move to the first photo for that dive. The cursor left and right keys act as previous and next.

I took the pictures with a Canon Powershot s60 using the Canon WP-DC40 waterproof case and a wet mount INON wide angle lens. I used manual calibration of white balance, and the Program Tv mode with exposure time set to 1/100 second and sensitivity to ISO 200. For the deep shots from the first dive, I manually adjusted the colour levels using the Gimp editor.