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Undiscovered Secret - the Canary Island of El Heirro  The Adventure Begins: The first of the twin centre dive trips organised by Sonia and Graham of ISLAND DIVERS, Tenerife. We have dived many times with them in Tenerife and always find then to be most professional and very friendly so we jumped at the chance to join them on their new venture to visit another island with them. The plan, to dive El Hierro the most westerly of the Canarian archipelago and Tenerife over a two week period, all being well. Trip starts with a flight from Gatwick on Friday courtesy of British Airways, no extra baggage allowance allowed unless the sports equipment was golf clubs, nothing new there then. To Tenerife Sur airport taking a sprightly three hours and thirty minutes. Baggage first off the conveyer belt things are looking good think I might buy a lottery ticket at this rate. The other members of the party are all travelling separately but we find our way to our respective hotels for a nights sleep to all meet up in morning to load the minibus to catch the 3.30pm ferry at Los Cristianos this is the fast ferry that will race us across the seventy odd miles to our destination in a couple of hours. The crossing was dead smooth I am very pleased to say as yours truly does suffer with mal de mer. The boat , or is it a ship, was very spacious owing to the fact that there was only five cars one van and a motorbike and no more than twenty people on board, and the bike was part of our gang, a rather tasty 1973 Bonneville T140v 750cc owned by Graham our illustrious leader. 
On arrival on the island we were met by the coach driver who whisked us away across the island to our destination of La Restinga where we were to find our accommodation overlooking the harbour, and all in close proximity to El Submarino, our hosts and dive guides for the five days we were to be on El Hierro. The accommodation was very good with all the self catering apartments being well equipped. Sonia and Graham occupied the top apartment and after our dives we would all met up for a post dive natter and an excellent lunch prepared for us by Sonia.Having claimed our appropriate rooms, and enjoyed the diving delights we all met up every evening for a meal in one of the local restaurants or I should say we met in the one local restaurant's for a more than adequate meal and several litres of exceptionally adequate wine. We all departed to meet the next morning. Some rather bleary eyed, met at the dive centre all quivering with excitement or was it alcohol poisoning, for the forth coming dives, quickly kitted and rigged up. All kit placed in the back of the centre's van or trailer for the short ride to the boat, but not for us we had to walk, not far though so no complaints there, to the rather nice 8.5 metre rib with a rather large inboard diesel, not sure how big but it went well. 
Now we are sitting on the tubes of the rib waiting with rising excitement and anticipation for the trip to the dive sight and to see what this baby can do, gentle tick over out the harbour entrance very sedate, turn left, or is it to port, still waiting for the throttle to open up but we stopped no more than 300 metres from the harbour for the first of ten magnificent dives.The rib was moored up to a marker buoy placed in the confines of the marine reserve. The reserve is well policed by the local wardens and we had a passing inspection to make sure that we were not over our allotted persons on board. Inspection over we hit the water following our more than competent and not unattractive dive guide Sylvia. Who was later described as being like Dory from the film finding Nemo as she did have a tendency to see something and dart off in all directions. 
Down to twenty metres or so then a swim out with the reef on our left where we were to see numerous large fish, Groupers Wrasse Stone fish and on our return to the mooring line a rather nice Angel shark was waiting for us to snap away at with our cameras.Back on board the boat the inane incessant excited chatter that follows a superb dive had to be heard to be believed. Back to the harbour for lunch, to be followed after a sufficient amount of time for dive two this time it was out of the harbour and turn right, or is it starboard, to another grand dive sight a bit farther away this time may be a ten minute ride again in the marine reserve into the water to be greeted by a rather large Turtle, I managed to get several shots of ....where it had been with my new digital camera, I must allow for the time delay, so the dives went on all much of the same superb large fish and superb viz. Sylvia and Fernando from El Submarino dive centre done us proud with the choice of dive sights. Some of the dives can be quite hard going if the tide is running but my diminutive wife didn't find it to difficult but the water was rather cold this early in the season, early March, so a good semi dry would be minimum and I did see another dive boat where the divers were wearing dry suits! Let's not forget that this was a two centre dive trip the second week to be in Tenerife, a much underrated dive location in my opinion. I managed to dive back on Tenerife but had to return to good old Blighty, still, I will be there again soon. Graham and Sonia of Island Divers are taking escorted trips to El Heirro regularly all year round, they can handle all your holiday arrangements and have a UK Booking office run by their daughter Penny who will be happy to quote you Tel: 0208 679 7069 Island Divers Tenerife BSAC Premier School Tel/Fax 0034 922 730815 Mobile 0034 670 969556 Website SPAIN main page CANARIES page | ||||
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