Club la Santa, Lanzarote
Today was a very exciting day, which I am now hoping to bore you about in not just words but embedded photos too, using a new app that I have downloaded to hopefully make my holiday blogging less stressful for me and prettier for my dear readers.
We got up at 7:30am, had a quick breakfast, and then hotfooted it over to the dive centre for 8:30am to set off for our sea dive. Despite the fact that I had been worrying about all sorts of worst case scenarios (mainly to do with the pressure building up in my ears and causing some sort of skull explosion), I'd managed to sleep well. Claire's cold was still there but not too bad and she felt ok to do the dive.
We were the only two booked on to the dive, which we were pleased about. Our instructor was called David, and had qualified as a diving instructor at the same place as Claire - Emperor Divers in Egypt. So I was pretty quiet during the drive to the the dive site while David and Claire chatted about "back in the day".
Our route took us through Timanfaya national park, which is entirely made up of dormant volcanoes and dried up lava. David pointed out a few volcanos in particular, including one where you can walk right inside the crater. He also pointed out some of the dried up lava which was a particularly rare type, and only found in Lanzarote and Hawaii. Two big Ironman triathlon islands!
Our dive was in a clamshell shaped cove called Playa Chica (Little Beach) at Puerto del Carmen, which is the opposite side of the island to La Santa, and is generally a lot warmer and less windy.
David sent us off to the toilets with a warning that if we weed in our wetsuits then we would have to buy them, and then we got kitted up and staggered down to the sand, weighed down by all our kit, not to mention the belts of lead weights.
And then after a short delay while we struggled to get our fins on, and David checked that I could breathe through my regulator with my face in the water, we were off. I was even more buoyant than I was for the pool dive, and I had to have three extra lead weights put in my pockets! Even Claire needed one today. I soon relaxed about the exploding skull worries, when I managed to pop my ears with no problems at all ("equalise" in dive speak).
Plus, I was soon too distracted by fish to be worrying about things. My ears very kindly let me know when they needed popping by hurting a bit every now and then.
I was surprised by the amount and variety of fish down there, as Claire had implied that there weren't many fish around the volcanic islands that she'd been to before.
Above - some cuttlefish. The one on the right is having some dinner in the form of a scorpion fish.
A cute fish that we can't remember the name of (above).
The fish with the pretty blue fins is a Canary Damselfish.
A Rainbow Wrasse (above)
A Barracuda (above) - over a metre long!
Some young Yellowfin Trevally - these were very lively and were dancing round in front of us.
An Arrowhead Spider Crab posing in front of a sea anemone.
I've saved the most exciting fish until last, although we actually saw it within the first five or ten minutes of the dive. Look carefully as it's good at hiding.
It's an Angel Shark, which I have since found out is on the critically endangered list of animals! As you can see, we were able to get pretty close to her without bothering her. I'm less than a metre away to give you an idea of scale. Angel Sharks hide out like this one is until something they fancy eating goes near it's mouth (which is underneath), and then they pounce. I'd been assured beforehand that divers weren't on the menu, not even for a taste. YouTube later suggested otherwise, although to be fair if I was the Angel Shark in the video, I'd have nipped the snorkeller if he'd been poking me like that.
We were under water for about 50 minutes. I have no idea where we went at all as my sense of direction doesn't seem to work under water. David told us afterwards that we'd been along both sides of the cove and round to the other side of the rocks on the left. We went down to over 11 metres, which I would have been very worried about beforehand, but it turned out to be fine, and didn't feel any different to 2 metres down. Besides, I had two instructors with me, what could possibly have gone wrong?
We had a quick sandwich and a drink before heading back to La Santa. All the photos were taken by David, and transferred to a memory stick for a reasonable sum back at the ranch.
We spent the afternoon kayaking on the lagoon in sea kayaks rather than the general purpose kayaks. They felt a bit more wobbly to me but I managed to stay upright. All good practice for our forthcoming sea kayaking tour in a few days.
Then we went for a quick swim in the lagoon in our wetsuits. We did more messing around with my new GoPro camera than swimming.
Tomorrow morning I had better go for a run, and then we might go up a volcano before our intermediate open water swimming lesson in the afternoon.
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