Sheephaven divers avoided last Sunday’s storm with a Saturday morning snorkel at PortnaBlagh instead.
Sunday morning’s condition were atrocious after a night of high northerly winds blowing in a large swell along the bay.
With waves of three to four metres high breaking on the pier and then pounding onto the beach its full force could be gauged from the missing port Navigation marker that had disappeared overnight.
It had been bent for a while but this winter storm had finished it off and not for the first time, with a previous one also being torn from its base by the force that the sea can bring to bear at this location.
While Mother Nature made the divers change their usual Sunday morning routine, she is delivering the nutrients for new life when spring eventually arrives off-shore.
These big storms stir up the mineral elements essential to sustain marine life up through the food chain, the nitrogen, potassium and phosphate held in salt compounds in the sea bed are stirred up into the water column to be held in suspension for later in the year.
The bedrock of the marine food chain are the Phytoplankton, which uses sunlight for their energy source but still need the essential elements to grow and indeed are limited in their capacity to reproduce by the amount of these available nutrients in the water.
As the Phytoplankton grow they are predated on by Zooplankton, which in turn are a food source for the smallest marine animals such as Sea Squirts up to the largest such a Basking Sharks.
So while Sunday’s storm may have curtailed snorkelling it was laying down the foundation for future diving observations in the year ahead.
By way of contrast, Saturday mornings snorkel was held in excellent sea conditions, with good in-water visibility and calm seas, while water temperature remains around 8 degrees Celsius.
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