KILKEE
TIR na nOG FOR IRISH DIVERS
Mick Moriarty
It is strange now to think that Kilkee was the place where all
Irish divers wanted to go in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Boat
diving was a rarity so Kilkee provided a wide variety of excellent
shore dives of which the first and very popular one was at the
Newfoundout. For those who do not know it, it is a swimming and
diving (board that is) place on the South side of the Bay at the
foot of a low cliff. Changing rooms were provided and it was possible
to have enough water in which to swim at any stage of the tide.
It was approached down a series of steps but the quantity and
weight of diving gear then to be carried did not provide a problem.
Falling back into about ten feet of water, the divers could move
out along the edge of a low reef running out at right angles to
the cliff. So, on one side there was a sloping rocky area covered
in heavy kelp and on the other side the sand of the bay. The dive
usually meant going straight out and then back on a reverse course.
This made navigation very easy, and in any case, u/w compasses
were not available then. The fish life and variety was generally
very good but crabs were about the only crustaceans to be seen.
It was an excellent dive site for beginners and the Limerick club
used it for all their training and testing. I tested many divers
there in those years for their 3rd Class certificates - mainly
from Limerick. That grade later became the CFT Club Diver.
It was a very young Manuel di Lucia who introduced us to the Pollock
Holes, a group of beautiful ponds in the rocks that were very
popular swimming places, and shortly afterwards to Myles’s
Creek on the outer edge of the extensive but flat reef where it
was possible to jump into 12 feet or more and where there was
a metal ladder for climbing back out. These sites are only accessible
at low tides, so one had to time the dive to finish before the
tide rose enough to wash away one’s clothes or indeed to
force a very long swim back to the shore.
When we first used Myles’s Creek, it was a men-only swimming
and sunbathing place and when some of the ‘female admirers’
followed us to the water’s edge there was much rushing to
cover up and quite a bit of grumbling about bloody divers and
their cursed women. In those happy far-off days it was normal
for a crowd to collect when divers prepared to go into the ‘dangerous
depths of the ocean’. With the advent of wet suits it was
less easy to identify the males from the females so the practice
of swimming in the nip died out quickly.
My first dive in Kilkee was at the Newfoundout on the 14th of
August 1960 with Adrian Clancy of the Limerick club. I was wearing
my very new bright yellow Dunlop wet suit that I had only received
a short time ago. I bought it as a replacement for the very unsatisfactory
and uncomfortable dry suit, most definitely an instrument of torture!
I was carrying a capillary depth gauge on my wrist. These gauges
were notoriously hard to read, and it was often necessary to shake
the water out of the glass tube before entering the water, otherwise
it could give a false reading. It was definitely not an instrument
for decompression diving! We were each carrying 40 cubic foot
cylinders with a pressure of 1,800 pounds per inch (psi) so the
dives tended to be short.
My Log Book tells me that the dive, No. 27, lasted for 15 minutes
during which we reached a depth of 35 feet! Happy days!
The photo shows us preparing to enter at low tide, George’s
Head in the background. I was using a club Mistral single stage
demand valve while Adrian, on the right, was using a Siebe-Heinke
two stage valve.
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