Temperate Diving » HollandMay08

This was our best planned trip to Holland yet, and so only right that it should go off the rails straightaway... we missed our ferry and had to sail the next morning rather than overnight. It cast a bit of a shadow which wasn't lifted when the vis turned out to be poor on a couple of the sites. The usually entertaining De Kabbelaar 'house' reef was like soup - perhaps due to recent work on a new walkway - and the Zeelandbrug was filthy and pretty much free of cuttlefish.  It was all grim news until we tried some of the other sites and found they were just as packed with animals as before, phew! Another interesting twist was that the regional tourism gods had started to update the facilities around the Oosterschelde - Eastern Scheldt - National Park, the largest in the Netherlands, and now there were toilets even in the middle of nowhere!

	Scharendijk We stay at De Kabbelaar whose 'house' reef is the equivalent of Stoney Cove with a steady stream of eager new divers to be dunked. There are training platforms (which we've never seen) but also a cluster of reef balls and plenty of shallow coastal wildlife.		Het Gamal 2 None of the sites we dive are very deep, so rather than move on we decided we'd have another dive on the same site after a short lunch break. Both concentrating on macro this time.
	Dreischor 1 Drieschor is one of the more remote dive sites on Schouen-Duiveland but another where reef balls have been planted. The site has a shallow shelf at 1-2m before an oyster covered reef slope down to 8-10m where the reef balls are.		Den Osse Den Osse is close to Scharendijk, it used to have one of the most awkward rocky entries but has been madeover with a new pontoon like Scharendijk. This is another reef ball site, similar in layout to Dreischor.
	Zeelandbrug The Zeelandbrug is THE site we go to dive... at roughly this time of year cuttlefish gather to breed and lay their eggs. The roughly bit is right, the gathering lasts for about two weeks peaking for a few days. We were on target in 07 but we missed in 08		Dreischor 2 Dreischor often has the best vis and so we chose it for the last dive of the trip. We were rewarded with displaying gobies and more slugs!
	Het Gamal 1 The Dreischor site is actually two in one, as well as the reef balls there's also the outlet of a land drainage pump which is marked will a wooden tower. This second site is known as Het Gamal - The Pump.		Last Year's Cuttlefish We're as sorry as you are that we missed the main cuttlefish orgy. Here's a link to the ones we saw last year :-)

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