A Nice Dive in a Rough Sea

    Already in the second half of October, a sunny but windy autumn day we went scuba diving in Llafranc, a nice diving location in Costa Brava in northern Spain. Next to the beach and all along the coast the sea was flat like a mirror with hardly any waves inviting people to lay on the beach trying to get the most of the last warm days this year. So after getting all the equipment, a big group of about thirty divers boarded the boat going to Ullastre I, the closest to land of three underwater mountains in front of Llafranc bay. The skipper told us to organize the diving groups and get fully equipped already on the port as the sea was quite rough out there and it takes less than 10 minutes reaching the diving site. The plan was jumping to the water as soon as possible, descending along the anchor rope and coming back the same way, limiting the dive to 45 minutes and avoiding any decompression time. Just five minutes after leaving the port, the waves height changed from 2 cm. to 3 m. making some of us to fell sick specially at the moment the boat stopped.

    Ullastre I is an underwater mountain going from approximately -12m to -35m. There is one big peak plus a few smaller hills with a top at more or less -20m. The northern side of the mountain is all covered with a mosaic of bright soft corals and sponges, while the southern slopes are more empty but anyway covered with short height seaweed and a good place to look for octopuses, occasional morays, conger eels and bright sea sloughs. In all the mountain there are many caves which are shelter for prawns, crabs, brittle stars and other fish who likes living in caves, while  all over the reef as usually there was plenty of small fish. Also towards the end of the dive we were surprised by a small group of barracudas.

An always curious conger eel.

Image via Wikipedia

At -15m we could already feel that going up will not be very pleasant. After surfacing the first thing we saw was the high prow of our boat going up and down. So we swam towards the stern joining the queue to climb up to the boat. Due to the big waves, the stairs were or completely submerged or showing three or four steps. With some effort we managed to reach the board and sat down while a good number of the first divers who returned to the boat before us were already feeding the fish with their breakfasts.

In all, we had a good dive in a nice location and also a bit of adventure to end the season.