Sheephaven divers were able to get back into the water again on Sunday as the effect of Storm Erik began to dissipate.
Erik brought sustained storm force winds with heavy rains that resulted in the big rivers inland overflowing into their floodplains, while out to sea there were a number of incidents reported of vessels in distress.
Some ships took refuge in Sheephaven Bay, which provided shelter from the south-westerly storm as it has previously done for so many years.
The pier was built in 1849 as part of The Great Famine relief works, with the first part of the project involving the building of a soup kitchen, from which the workers received a noggin of soup for their day’s labour.
The unusual stone building was subsequently always referred to as The Noggin and remained intact until the mid-1990s when in a moment of cultural vandalism it was demolished with a few stokes of a mechanical digger.
The huge cast iron pots in which the soup was made were used by the local fishermen into the late 1960s to tar their nets, but in the fullness of time, they too have disappeared.
In the 1980s a new breakwater was built behind the pier and it was later followed by the carpark and slipway that provides such a benefit to all who use PortnaBlagh for both commercial fishing and recreation today.
But once again the PortnaBlagh pier took the full brunt of the force of nature, a testament to the people who designed and built the structure 180 years ago.
In sunnier climes, some of our Sheephaven colleagues got to dive on the possibly the best shipwreck available to recreational divers, the Thistlegorm in the Red Sea.
At a maximum depth of just over 30metres to the seabed, the WWII wreck contains a treasure trove of large calibre ordnance, Lee Enfield rifles, aircraft parts, desert prepared trucks, BSA motorbikes, armoured cars, tracked Bren Gun carriers and two locomotives.
Generally, on a trip to the area, there are at least three dives given over to the Thistlegorm, one of which will be a night dive and previously a large turtle was observed using the ship as a shelter for a nights sleep.
Nearby the Thistlegorm lies the Rosie Muller, a ship of similar size sunk by the same German night time bomber, which in turn was shot down and it also lies nearby, all three a testament of a terrible conflict of the Second World War.
We wait to hear from our colleagues of their travelling adventures, including the stopover at Istanbul airport, a week of sharing a live-aboard and over 20 dives in six days.
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