Inside the canyon we had the first encounters with scorpion fish of remarkable size laying motionless on the bottom. As they can change the colour of their skin, often they look like one more stone covered with seaweed, but getting closer first you see the eye observing you, and if you came closer, the dorsal fin raises warning you that they are poisonous. Only under the light of a torch they show their real bright red colour. Almost at the end of the canyon, when both slopes sink in the sand, in an area full of small caves we were very lucky to see an adult, about 70 cms long Torpedo torpedo, a species of round-bodied electric ray, capable to give electric shocks up to 220V and 1A of intensity. It was lying in its cave, half covered with sand, waiting for the night as they are more active only after dusk. Just a few metres further we could see a very nice bright coloured lobster pointing at us with its long antennae and under it, two more good sized scorpion fish. Already very happy for what we had seen, almost in the deepest point, right before starting the way back, we were met by a muray eel. Its head outside the hole, blue coloured, with a face that resembles and old woman, opening and closing its four teeth mouth. And after saying good bye to the muray eel, we entered the realm of the conger eel.

I don't know how many of those we saw. Many. Sometimes we saw the tail, sometimes the head, or parts of the body through holes in their caves. The biggest of them was a thick as my arm. Of the last one we saw only the tail, but tackling it a bit we could see the head popping up through the other exit of the cave. They have big eyes and thick lips, and curious as they are, often they come out to have a look who is coming. Towards the end of the dive we were exploring the last cracks around the ancore, being rewarded with the sight of some brittle stars, a beautiful hermit crab with three anemones on top of its shell, plus a few bright red Galathea crabs and some small prawns that go out of their holes only at night. In total we were an entire hour under the water, including the three minutes safety stop at three metres. Unforgettable.

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.