Early this morning I went to Llafranch, a small village on the Costa Brava where I've been diving since the early 90's. Today we were planning to do a dive in a place called Furió Fitó, but when we were already on the way there, the people form the diving centre decided to go to another place due to strong currents. The choice was a place called Isla Negra. On the surface you can see very little, just a few rocks a couple of metres over see level. Under the surface it spreads towards the east up to 26m. deep.
Finding the way under the water was not complicated as you basically have to go around that massive rock. I was there on my own so I was assigned a buddy of similar experience. I could not speak much with him as I my French is very limited, though anyway under the water all signals are very standard so we understood each other very well. After a multilingual briefing given by the pilot, we jumped to the water. On the surface the temperature was around 24C, finding the first thermocline about ten metres deeper, making us feel a bit cold for a couple of minutes till we got used to the new temperature. During the dive we were checking the many small caves and under big stones of the cliffs, seeing quite a lot of small fish, sea cucumbers, an occasional pen shell and lots of many different sponges, yellow polyps covering the ceilings, deadman's hand and some red coral in some places. The average depth for the first part of the dive was 22-23m. When I was already thinking that this was going to be a fishless dive, I saw the first big red scorpion fish, and right after it a moray eel, followed by one of those funny white sea slugs that are called “little Swiss cows” by locals and a couple of reasonably big octopuses hidden in their caves.
By that time my computer was showing 4 minutes of decompression time and 100 bar left in my airtank, so I decided to go a bit higher where it is warmer, there is a bit more light and we don't take so much nitrogen. Somewhere there, at aproximately 12m we saw the star of the dive which was a large Mediterranean grouper trying to hide in a cave. In the last minutes of the dive, at around 6m. we were looking for the small animals that hide in cracks. It didn't took much time finding two or three of my favourites ones which are brittle stars with their whip-like arms. In total we were 45 minutes under the water, reaching a maximum depth of 25m. It was an excellent and quite dive, very relaxed and with good rewards. Days like this make you love this sport.
