CLUBFOCUS
About to dive the geo at Westray
How does the club raise funds?
Members pay a small boat fee of £ 15 for a day’ s RIB diving. Our club has also been successful in raising some funds through grant applications from local organisations, as well as national charitable initiatives. We have also raised money through our local community charity shop, where various organisations take turns to donate items for sale and staff the shop for a week to raise funds for their projects. Our fundraising has enabled us to carry out necessary repairs to our clubhouse and to replace essential items such as our compressor and oxygen kit.
Being on an island gives you easy access to diving – how often do you get out?
Members dive most weekends, all year long if the weather allows. We are not restricted by water temperatures( minimum 6 ° C, max 14 ° C) but the strong winds and wind chill can be a barrier to diving. Generally, we dive from our club RIB, although we also carry out shore dives on the First and Second World War blockships at the Churchill Barriers. Sometimes we dive from the far more comfortable charter boats that operate out of Stromness.
When we dive from our RIB, we can launch from various slips to dive all around
Orkney. You can see a video from a perfect day out in January on our Facebook page. We were out from sunrise to sunset, it was flat calm, we had lunch on Cava Island and the diving was great.
Visiting divers will know the German fleet wrecks in Scapa Flow, but as locals where do you like to dive?
As you say, we have easy access to Scapa Flow and we do dive the German Fleet. We have a tremendous diversity of dive sites around Orkney, including a wealth of scenic dive sites available to us throughout the islands, from beautiful maerl and seagrass
A two RIB dive day
Equipment Officer Lindsay Reid, Chair Lee Spence and Robbie Bruce on a snowy surface interval
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