Our holiday was a really good break and a good deal better than I imagined
it would be. Flew (by aeroplane) from Bristol on the Sunday, getting to
Arrecife in daylight so able to enjoy the strange scenery from the bus on
Day One. The hotel was immense but tolerably so. We were in an outlying
block with a sea view and not much noise. It had beds, A/C, patio and a bit
of garden, telly, not much else. The complex had seven swimming pools, a
gym, therapy-spa, several restaurants, a 'piano bar' (someone sneaked a
saxophone in but he escaped with only minor injuries and a caution from the
Guardia Civil), entertainments hall, (Butlins style but okay)
Lots of naked breasts, which oddly, I somewhat resent. (God, am I getting old,
but I don't like having to avert my gaze because some bloody exhibitionist
wants to flaunt her leathery skin. Some truly beautiful girls too; I often thought of Robert.) Generally relaxed on the first day though we had an
abortive attempt to do the '20 minute' walk to Playa Blanca (It actually
took about that long to run it - I know; I did it) I had already had a walk
along in the opposite direction to the local lighthouse but there were no
ship-wrecks and no people drowning, in fact nothing to laugh at, at all.
Second morning Lynne and I walked into Playa Blanca to pick up our hire car, a
Fiat Ulysses. This is an immense car, not quite a mini-bus. It had
electric side doors (great fun!) and bald tyres. Lynne did her strut and
got it changed, the hire car bloke not being a match for my minder. The
replacement had pretty naff tyres too but was deemed safe, rain not being
forecast before 2027.
First outing was from Playa Blanca to El Golfo where a blooming great volcano has
gone BANG! and made a hole in the ground which the ocean has obligingly
filled with briny stuff. Lynne bought a bit of volcano which has been
brought home in the hope that it will have dust-repellent properties.
On from El Golfo we stopped at the National Park which is a sort of volcano
museum. You have to go round it in a bus. Rather them than me, a VERY
challenging drive and one I would rather not be attempting in a Fiat the
size of the Titanic. Stunning scenery, looking like a place where a lot of rock has
got very hot and crashed down from a great height - which it had. Watched
them cooking meat over a five foot deep hole in the ground - the heat is
enough to blister your skin just a foot below the surface - and some mush
poured a bucket of water down a hole in the ground which went off like a
blunderbuss nearly taking poor Pedro's head with it. (I called him 'some
mush'. Maybe he was 'some geyser'...) A very impressive display without
the benefit of a piece of blue paper to light before retiring. Across the
way someone was chucking hay into a similar hole in the ground which was
self-igniting. You have to ask yourself how they dug these holes. Maybe
Pat and Mick did it with their shovels. So far Jess and Will, the children
of our friend Jackie, had played computer games and been totally bored
throughout. What would it take to raise any interest? I wonder if they
would be excited by being on the next shuttle launch...
We went on a bit of a trek the next day, firstly to Cesar Manrique's house
which is a load of rooms built in holes in the ground (more blooming holes,
these ones somewhat cooler luckily!) He was an artist contemporary with
Pablo Picasso and, as far as I can see, nearly as potty. Smashing house but
rather tellingly he moved out and changed its use to a convention centre and
gallery for potty artists so maybe it was a bit of a 'mare to live in.
Then we went to Jameos del Agua which is a natural cave in the lava which
contains a very rare type of blind cave crab. Manrique had been there first
and turned the place into a strange auditorium and café etc. Good, very
restful - unless you are Jess and Will who found it a bit...boring.
Went into Playa Blanca by car that evening, a very hot version of Burnham on
Sea but without as many parking spaces, which in an ocean tanker named Fiat
was a bit of a challenge.
I took the car back next day (Thursday) at the crack of dawn and ran back, the only running I did all holiday despite my very best intentions. Slobbed for a while and then came over all energetic and went looking for some scuba action...
CLICK here for diving posting
Well that gets us to Friday...and to be honest the time was rattling by and
a routine had built up of get up, scoff up, lie down, get up for more scoff,
lie down, swim, lie down, scoff up, lie down, swim, scoff up, sleep.
The scoffing was amazing. Jackie had wanted to go for 'all-inclusive'
catering, something I greeted somewhat coolly as I had visions of a vast
greedy orgy of Dutch and German gluttons being paid for by... us. I have to
admit that we gave as good as we got, or rather we scoffed in most impressive
style and put on a stone each. I just hope the Germans were impressed as we
picked up four puddings each at every meal. For once Jess and Will were
paying it their full attention. Beer was 'free' as was wine etc though they
were of average quality to be kind. The range and quality of food was very
good and even Lynne, so hard to cater for normally, was generally very
pleased with her food and smiled several times until she realised we were
watching her!
The heat was the other notable thing. It got hotter and hotter with a
breeze blowing from the general direction of the Moroccan Sahara, maybe
cooling a tad over the Atlantic before passing over the Rubicon Desert on
Lanzarote, a huge field of almost jet black rock. Even then you'll be
amazed to hear the temperature reached 48 degrees one day. Ouch. None of
us really felt good in that heat. You could only get away from it in the
pool and to add to the discomfort we realised that the A/C was playing up
and we were not cooling down a lot at night. Eventually even the mosquitoes
gave up trying to fly, but not before giving one or two of us a nasty nip,
especially Jackie, who is pretty tasty.
Friday 7 August 2009
Tuesday 4 August 2009
Going down in the world
This year's holiday stands out from many of the others as I didn't have my bike with me. You could hire them in Lanzarote but the roads were unappealing and the heat fearsome so I never got round to it. But very soon we realised that there were several scuba diving schools in the area around Playa Blanca where we were staying (Playa Blanca - White beach. Someone should be prosecuted under the Trades Descriptions Act) The hotel rep suggested a good scuba school and so we wandered along trying to look like cool water-sports dudes amongst all the tanned and muscular divers. I think my favourite tanned and muscular divers were the girls. Does diving do something to women? Why are they all gorgeous?
The school was essentially a shed with a small pool in front of it, this being just like a normal swimming pool but with no shallow end (It's a diving school after all!) In it we experienced the strange but exhilarating feeling of using the breathing apparatus. I tend to breath through my mouth anyway so it was just like walking around in the living room with the exception that there was a foot of water above my head. It's odd how quickly you accept that strange fact.
Lisa and I both tried the pool experience. She is a fearless and strong swimmer and I am, well, too timid to admit terror, so we booked a 'Try-Dive' on the Friday afternoon. Lynne, infected by our enthusiasm said she would come along and try the scuba gear or at least a snorkel. As time went past she demonstrated such a considerable talent for back-pedalling; she should ride fixed-wheel bicycles. Anyway Friday dawned as ferociously hot as every other day that week and we nervously checked in for our dive. Some form filling followed, followed by a short but useful explanation of theory and hand signals. Then there was a sizing up of feet and leg-length etc. in order to get the right size of wetsuit and fins. It was my first experience of rubber clothing - what a laugh! The legs are the main problem. It was one of the few times when I might have been grateful to have skinnier legs. Got the bottoms pulled up eventually and then it was time to struggle into the top half too. The thing to do is to plunge into the pool to fill the suit up with water as it keeps a constant temperature. It's hard to over-state the value of this as it limits the cold shock of getting into the sea and even more importantly in Lanzarote in August, it keeps the heat at bay. The temperature was 46 degrees that day! When I got back out of the pool Lisa was still struggling with her legs and the wet-suit. Three pairs of hands makes light work though and eventually we shoe-horned her into it.
Of course it takes more than a stylish rubber suit to make a diver and next I was fitted with a belt with lead weights on it. "Don't go near the pool!" I was told - not bad advice as the belt must have weighed about 20 pounds. It certainly pressed down on the hips.
The breathing gear goes on next. Obviously there is a tank of air, but also a waistcoat which can be inflated to give you buoyancy. I haven't seen James Bond in one of these (I kept thinking of dear old James; I shall never see him in scuba gear again without laughing) but it was a fantastic bit of kit.
The final touch to the ensemble is a mask, a tight fit on the face to keep the water out.
"Spit on it; think of it as a Chelsea Mask!" said the instructor, adding "unless you happen to be a Chelsea supporter. Keep it to yourself if you are..."
Saliva prevents the mask from misting up; there's not much point in going to the bottom of the sea and not being able to see through the window!
Then at last it was time to 'take the plunge' and our group of about 8 novices and 2 (or 3?) instructors, partly English and partly German, strode off purposefully to the nearby beach. (Could we not have been lifted there by crane? I must have weighed 18 stone). Walking across the stones of the beach was agony, weighing as much as a beached whale and having no shoes on. It was like heaven when the instructor called on us to sit down in the water and lie back and let the inflatable jacket do all the work. You can't walk with the fins on; they are about 18 inches long so you have to put them on once you are floating. Maybe it's just me but I found that quite a challenge. What with the buoyancy, the exaggerated weight and my general lack of flexibility (especially in all that crazy gear) I found myself rolling madly all over the Atlantic Ocean. The instructors were good though and noticed a geriatric and struggling baby diver when they saw one so I was unable to drown quite yet.
We were told to move forwards, as if crawling, into the water. This was done gradually until all the party are in the water, with head submerged, and hopefully all breathing the tank air. On our initial dive the instructors kept control of our buoyancy. I was unaware of it as the air was released from the jacket to make us float with neutral buoyancy in the sea. There is a mad rolling time as the jacket and air tank interfere with your stability then suddenly all is serene and you are apparently weightless.
As we moved into the water, and it shelves down steeply there, the instructor moved a few feet away from us and then beckoned us forward. So we moved forwards into the sea in a series of stop-start movements as the instructor moved back and then beckoned us on.
The instructors were understandably anxious that we should not swim all over the place but remain instead in a tightly packed group where they could see us and count us at all times. This lead to a bit of bumping and the odd elbow or hand knocking you as eleven or twelve scuba divers occupied the space which might be quite intimately cosy with just two or three rubber clad nutters.
The stop-start advance continued for a few minutes and we started to gain a little depth. Very soon the pressure became apparent. The water in your body is virtually incompressible and your body doesn't change shape much as you dive - not so the air in your body, as the air in your lungs slowly becomes more compressed and the air in your sinuses gets squeezed down small. It is the sinus cavities compressing that cause some ear pain. I have rather waxed up ears and I found it hard to 'equalise' the pressure difference across my ears. This led to a few minutes of quite unpleasant ear pain but it soon faded.
Once I got lower in the water and started to feel more relaxed I felt confident to look around me and see my new universe, about a hundred feet across with no obvious North, South, East or West. (No wonder they don't want you swimming off - which way is home?) Under Lanzarote's sunshine there is much light and plenty to see. I checked to see where Lisa was and she was giving me the 'OK' signal and obviously having a good time. Shoals of fish came to check us out, fascinating colours and patterns. Above us was the inflatable boat belonging to the dive school. How odd to see an anchor in use from the business end! Plenty of noise down there too, mostly the sound of me breathing but also the general hubbub of the ocean smashing itself tirelessly against the shore and various other things banging about including the gentle tinkle of the boat's anchor cable. One of the instructors had clearly got the family relationships sorted out in advance as he was taking photos and getting shots of mother/daughter and father/son groups etc and photoed Lisa and I together.
Our group was still tightly packed but we moved around the sea-bed a short way, wheeling in formation like rubber soldiers in a very odd military parade. In time we made it back to the same place as we had embarked from and in no time we were floating on the surface again, not before taking part in the rolling motion of the sea which was a mildly alarming experience as the environment seemed to go backwards and forwards past us in time to the waves. Standing up we were reminded of how heavy and ungainly we were on land. I felt like I weighed a ton! Naomi, one of the instructors, help me stand and haul myself back up the shingle and stone slope of the beach. Normally I would be embarrassed to be helped to walk by a girl but I was prepared to make an exception for blond, tanned Kiwi Naomi, partly because she was a great advert for the benefits of the outdoor life and partly because my tired old legs could only just hold me up!
Then it was back to the 'school' to divest ourselves of all this weight, having help to remove the breathing gear and jacket and Oh-so-carefully taking off that lead belt. (It was foremost in my mind that the heavy belt was vertically above the delicate and unprotected toes!) The wet-suit seemed to peel off somewhat more easily than it went on and off we went to see the photos of ourselves. Everyone seemed to have a good time and when it was suggested that we did another dive the next day Lisa and I agreed immediately.
The next day the preliminaries were sorted out more quickly and then Lisa and I were shown the workings of the jackets so that we could control our own buoyancy and set the height we floated at in the water on our own. This is done with three possible release valves which discharge air from the jacket. Air rises in water so generally you use whichever valve is at the top. If you try to use a valve which is at the bottom the air just stays inside the jacket! We quickly got dressed in our scuba gear this time and Lisa was issued with a different suit, one which she managed to put on in no time.
Somehow we contrived to enter the water from a sandy part of the beach, (why couldn't we do that the day before?) and even the fin-fitting acrobatics were less embarrassing. As old hands we entered the water somewhat more quickly which for me was not a good thing and the compression and the struggle with equalising my ear pressure etc never went well. I was in some pain for quite a while. This does diminish however and I was just getting comfortable in the water again when I realised everyone else had gone back to the surface. Not sure if I had missed some signal to go back up I followed like a lemming, only to discover that Lisa had risen to the top somewhat involuntarily and the instructor had gone with her to see that she was okay. Of course this meant that we all had to dive back down again from the surface and I had to endure the ear pain all over again. I was equalising my ear pressure as much as I could but it was still very painful for about two or three minutes. Then it fades away slowly and is soon forgotten in the fascinating submarine world. I started to experiment with the buoyancy control which is when I realised why Lisa had gone to the surface so unexpectedly. As you start to rise the air in the jacket expands, thus causing even more buoyancy and making you rise still more in a chain reaction. Anyway my experiments led to me hitting the surface suddenly and sheepishly explaining that nothing was actually wrong; I just didn't weigh enough... The instructor later explained that even quite experienced divers often surface quite involuntarily which made me feel quite a lot better.
Well, off we went again back down into the 'depths', more ear pain and more exhilaration as a reward for my suffering. This was still, after all, my first hour under water so I didn't expect it to come too easily. We started to swim out across a large expanse of light coloured sand, moving quite slowly - in fact the instructor seemed to hang in the water like a true amphibian. I've seen newts do the very same thing. It was interesting to watch the experienced divers too; they seemed to breath so slowly whereas Lisa and I were a steady stream of bubbles. They were using their air intake to vary their depth very accurately. We beginners seemed more preoccupied with just making sure each breath was followed by another one!
After a distance of maybe a hundred yards we came to a length of old anchor rope, maybe lost from a fishing boat. Our instructor slowly pulled on it; I couldn't make out why at first but he was examining it. He had hoped to find a seahorse clinging to it but when he came to the end of his rope he produced an underwater notebook and showed us the words "SEA HORSE GONE" As a consolation he handed us a crab which ran up and down our arms and amused me by running in 'mid air' as it fell back to the sea bed. As soon as it reached the sea bed it buried itself in the sand, very aware that there are things out there that eat crabs, and not knowing if I was one of them. Twice during the dive he caught octopuses, the first one conforming to Hollywood stereo-types of scary undersea monsters by glueing itself to the front of his mask and squirting brown ink all over us all. Having failed to find any seahorses we swam back to shallower water and looked at the fish in a great grassy reed bed, many small yellow fish, some amazingly bright. On a nearby rock reef, an outcrop of volcanic lava, were more brightly coloured fish, some of electric blue, some multi coloured Wrasse and a few seriously ugly things skulking where the nasty divers couldn't see them. Bigger disc shaped fish, many with a large black spot half way along their lateral line came to view us and inspect the sand we stirred up.
All too soon it was time to leave the water though and experience the effects of gravity on very heavy people again. I asked where we had been and had it pointed out on the sea's surface before us. Our depth had been about 6.5 metres, not a great depth but that's not the point. Just going where people don't normally go is the point.
Both Lisa and I are left wondering whether to go for diving qualifications, if only to find out what on earth PADI stands for.
Pool experience free, try-dive 58euros, further dive 44euros
The school was essentially a shed with a small pool in front of it, this being just like a normal swimming pool but with no shallow end (It's a diving school after all!) In it we experienced the strange but exhilarating feeling of using the breathing apparatus. I tend to breath through my mouth anyway so it was just like walking around in the living room with the exception that there was a foot of water above my head. It's odd how quickly you accept that strange fact.
Lisa and I both tried the pool experience. She is a fearless and strong swimmer and I am, well, too timid to admit terror, so we booked a 'Try-Dive' on the Friday afternoon. Lynne, infected by our enthusiasm said she would come along and try the scuba gear or at least a snorkel. As time went past she demonstrated such a considerable talent for back-pedalling; she should ride fixed-wheel bicycles. Anyway Friday dawned as ferociously hot as every other day that week and we nervously checked in for our dive. Some form filling followed, followed by a short but useful explanation of theory and hand signals. Then there was a sizing up of feet and leg-length etc. in order to get the right size of wetsuit and fins. It was my first experience of rubber clothing - what a laugh! The legs are the main problem. It was one of the few times when I might have been grateful to have skinnier legs. Got the bottoms pulled up eventually and then it was time to struggle into the top half too. The thing to do is to plunge into the pool to fill the suit up with water as it keeps a constant temperature. It's hard to over-state the value of this as it limits the cold shock of getting into the sea and even more importantly in Lanzarote in August, it keeps the heat at bay. The temperature was 46 degrees that day! When I got back out of the pool Lisa was still struggling with her legs and the wet-suit. Three pairs of hands makes light work though and eventually we shoe-horned her into it.
Of course it takes more than a stylish rubber suit to make a diver and next I was fitted with a belt with lead weights on it. "Don't go near the pool!" I was told - not bad advice as the belt must have weighed about 20 pounds. It certainly pressed down on the hips.
The breathing gear goes on next. Obviously there is a tank of air, but also a waistcoat which can be inflated to give you buoyancy. I haven't seen James Bond in one of these (I kept thinking of dear old James; I shall never see him in scuba gear again without laughing) but it was a fantastic bit of kit.
The final touch to the ensemble is a mask, a tight fit on the face to keep the water out.
"Spit on it; think of it as a Chelsea Mask!" said the instructor, adding "unless you happen to be a Chelsea supporter. Keep it to yourself if you are..."
Saliva prevents the mask from misting up; there's not much point in going to the bottom of the sea and not being able to see through the window!
Then at last it was time to 'take the plunge' and our group of about 8 novices and 2 (or 3?) instructors, partly English and partly German, strode off purposefully to the nearby beach. (Could we not have been lifted there by crane? I must have weighed 18 stone). Walking across the stones of the beach was agony, weighing as much as a beached whale and having no shoes on. It was like heaven when the instructor called on us to sit down in the water and lie back and let the inflatable jacket do all the work. You can't walk with the fins on; they are about 18 inches long so you have to put them on once you are floating. Maybe it's just me but I found that quite a challenge. What with the buoyancy, the exaggerated weight and my general lack of flexibility (especially in all that crazy gear) I found myself rolling madly all over the Atlantic Ocean. The instructors were good though and noticed a geriatric and struggling baby diver when they saw one so I was unable to drown quite yet.
We were told to move forwards, as if crawling, into the water. This was done gradually until all the party are in the water, with head submerged, and hopefully all breathing the tank air. On our initial dive the instructors kept control of our buoyancy. I was unaware of it as the air was released from the jacket to make us float with neutral buoyancy in the sea. There is a mad rolling time as the jacket and air tank interfere with your stability then suddenly all is serene and you are apparently weightless.
As we moved into the water, and it shelves down steeply there, the instructor moved a few feet away from us and then beckoned us forward. So we moved forwards into the sea in a series of stop-start movements as the instructor moved back and then beckoned us on.
The instructors were understandably anxious that we should not swim all over the place but remain instead in a tightly packed group where they could see us and count us at all times. This lead to a bit of bumping and the odd elbow or hand knocking you as eleven or twelve scuba divers occupied the space which might be quite intimately cosy with just two or three rubber clad nutters.
The stop-start advance continued for a few minutes and we started to gain a little depth. Very soon the pressure became apparent. The water in your body is virtually incompressible and your body doesn't change shape much as you dive - not so the air in your body, as the air in your lungs slowly becomes more compressed and the air in your sinuses gets squeezed down small. It is the sinus cavities compressing that cause some ear pain. I have rather waxed up ears and I found it hard to 'equalise' the pressure difference across my ears. This led to a few minutes of quite unpleasant ear pain but it soon faded.
Once I got lower in the water and started to feel more relaxed I felt confident to look around me and see my new universe, about a hundred feet across with no obvious North, South, East or West. (No wonder they don't want you swimming off - which way is home?) Under Lanzarote's sunshine there is much light and plenty to see. I checked to see where Lisa was and she was giving me the 'OK' signal and obviously having a good time. Shoals of fish came to check us out, fascinating colours and patterns. Above us was the inflatable boat belonging to the dive school. How odd to see an anchor in use from the business end! Plenty of noise down there too, mostly the sound of me breathing but also the general hubbub of the ocean smashing itself tirelessly against the shore and various other things banging about including the gentle tinkle of the boat's anchor cable. One of the instructors had clearly got the family relationships sorted out in advance as he was taking photos and getting shots of mother/daughter and father/son groups etc and photoed Lisa and I together.
Our group was still tightly packed but we moved around the sea-bed a short way, wheeling in formation like rubber soldiers in a very odd military parade. In time we made it back to the same place as we had embarked from and in no time we were floating on the surface again, not before taking part in the rolling motion of the sea which was a mildly alarming experience as the environment seemed to go backwards and forwards past us in time to the waves. Standing up we were reminded of how heavy and ungainly we were on land. I felt like I weighed a ton! Naomi, one of the instructors, help me stand and haul myself back up the shingle and stone slope of the beach. Normally I would be embarrassed to be helped to walk by a girl but I was prepared to make an exception for blond, tanned Kiwi Naomi, partly because she was a great advert for the benefits of the outdoor life and partly because my tired old legs could only just hold me up!
Then it was back to the 'school' to divest ourselves of all this weight, having help to remove the breathing gear and jacket and Oh-so-carefully taking off that lead belt. (It was foremost in my mind that the heavy belt was vertically above the delicate and unprotected toes!) The wet-suit seemed to peel off somewhat more easily than it went on and off we went to see the photos of ourselves. Everyone seemed to have a good time and when it was suggested that we did another dive the next day Lisa and I agreed immediately.
The next day the preliminaries were sorted out more quickly and then Lisa and I were shown the workings of the jackets so that we could control our own buoyancy and set the height we floated at in the water on our own. This is done with three possible release valves which discharge air from the jacket. Air rises in water so generally you use whichever valve is at the top. If you try to use a valve which is at the bottom the air just stays inside the jacket! We quickly got dressed in our scuba gear this time and Lisa was issued with a different suit, one which she managed to put on in no time.
Somehow we contrived to enter the water from a sandy part of the beach, (why couldn't we do that the day before?) and even the fin-fitting acrobatics were less embarrassing. As old hands we entered the water somewhat more quickly which for me was not a good thing and the compression and the struggle with equalising my ear pressure etc never went well. I was in some pain for quite a while. This does diminish however and I was just getting comfortable in the water again when I realised everyone else had gone back to the surface. Not sure if I had missed some signal to go back up I followed like a lemming, only to discover that Lisa had risen to the top somewhat involuntarily and the instructor had gone with her to see that she was okay. Of course this meant that we all had to dive back down again from the surface and I had to endure the ear pain all over again. I was equalising my ear pressure as much as I could but it was still very painful for about two or three minutes. Then it fades away slowly and is soon forgotten in the fascinating submarine world. I started to experiment with the buoyancy control which is when I realised why Lisa had gone to the surface so unexpectedly. As you start to rise the air in the jacket expands, thus causing even more buoyancy and making you rise still more in a chain reaction. Anyway my experiments led to me hitting the surface suddenly and sheepishly explaining that nothing was actually wrong; I just didn't weigh enough... The instructor later explained that even quite experienced divers often surface quite involuntarily which made me feel quite a lot better.
Well, off we went again back down into the 'depths', more ear pain and more exhilaration as a reward for my suffering. This was still, after all, my first hour under water so I didn't expect it to come too easily. We started to swim out across a large expanse of light coloured sand, moving quite slowly - in fact the instructor seemed to hang in the water like a true amphibian. I've seen newts do the very same thing. It was interesting to watch the experienced divers too; they seemed to breath so slowly whereas Lisa and I were a steady stream of bubbles. They were using their air intake to vary their depth very accurately. We beginners seemed more preoccupied with just making sure each breath was followed by another one!
After a distance of maybe a hundred yards we came to a length of old anchor rope, maybe lost from a fishing boat. Our instructor slowly pulled on it; I couldn't make out why at first but he was examining it. He had hoped to find a seahorse clinging to it but when he came to the end of his rope he produced an underwater notebook and showed us the words "SEA HORSE GONE" As a consolation he handed us a crab which ran up and down our arms and amused me by running in 'mid air' as it fell back to the sea bed. As soon as it reached the sea bed it buried itself in the sand, very aware that there are things out there that eat crabs, and not knowing if I was one of them. Twice during the dive he caught octopuses, the first one conforming to Hollywood stereo-types of scary undersea monsters by glueing itself to the front of his mask and squirting brown ink all over us all. Having failed to find any seahorses we swam back to shallower water and looked at the fish in a great grassy reed bed, many small yellow fish, some amazingly bright. On a nearby rock reef, an outcrop of volcanic lava, were more brightly coloured fish, some of electric blue, some multi coloured Wrasse and a few seriously ugly things skulking where the nasty divers couldn't see them. Bigger disc shaped fish, many with a large black spot half way along their lateral line came to view us and inspect the sand we stirred up.
All too soon it was time to leave the water though and experience the effects of gravity on very heavy people again. I asked where we had been and had it pointed out on the sea's surface before us. Our depth had been about 6.5 metres, not a great depth but that's not the point. Just going where people don't normally go is the point.
Both Lisa and I are left wondering whether to go for diving qualifications, if only to find out what on earth PADI stands for.
Pool experience free, try-dive 58euros, further dive 44euros
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