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BSAC 21 Dive Trip to Ullapool, Summer Isles & Loch Broom – June 2009 Part 1

Finally after four years and several missed opportunities I managed to organise a Dive trip to Ullapool and the Summer Isles! I decided to plan this as a birthday treat for the midsummers solistice trip up on the North West of the Scottish Highlands.

After getting 4 other BSAC 21 Divers and Rob my friend from down south to make up the numbers I tested the limits of how much stuff you can pack into a Toyota RAV4 and tow a Rhib at the same time this included two Sets of dive kit My wife Tara, Rob and the three Scottie Dogs Molly, Hector and Fergus. After a 5 hour drive through a variety of weather conditions from Perth we made it safely to the Bunkhouse at the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool we popped around to meet Andy From the Ullapool Sub aqua Club who very kindly offered to fill our bottles on the Saturday Afternoon and their web site was very useful for dive planning. There are two main slips / beaches to launch from to access the Loch Broom / Summer Isles these are the Beach at Ullapool at the far end to the Harbour you can drive down onto the beach although only really suitable for a 4X4 and the Slip at Old Dornie Harbour near Altandhu which is closer for the Summer Isles but a good 40 minutes drive on narrow roads from Ullapool.

On the Saturday morning the weather was fantastic blue skys and after a quick breakfast of bacon rolls collected by Tara we left Ullapool at 9am for the trip out to the Wreck of the Fairweather V one of the most popular wrecks in the region. With flat calm sea conditions is only took us 20 or so minutes to get out to the Fairweather V and after 5 minutes we located the Wreck and dropped the shot so good so far 🙂

Nancy and I were the first to go in and realised how bad the Algal bloom was, normally up here you would expect to get 10 metres+ visibility but ours was 2-3 metres what a pity.

What a great intact wreck with plenty of Plumose Anemomes on it and the Bridge with the Bridge seats still there. The glass in the windows has now gone compared to a couple of years ago, I look forward to visiting this wreck again in better visibility.

We stopped at the old ruins at Achmore for Lunch just a few minutes drive from the Fairweather V and were greeted by the hungry and opportunistic horses. In the afternoon needing to get back to Ullapool to fill the tanks, we decided to dive at Cuckoo point at the entrance to Loch Broom unfortunately the algal bloom was denser here and the visibility dropped further.