Estartit & Medas Islands

by by Nick Parsons

A stranger came up to me and thrust a video in my hand, "You’ll enjoy this!" he said, as I slipped it into the carrier bag, full of interesting and colourful handouts (junk) I had collected at the Dive show.

Imagine my delight (?) when it turned out to be a promotional video for a Spanish dive centre, nice pictures, shame about the music! Once again the lure of sunshine, sea, sangria and …..not being at work, overcame my normally cautious nature.

Next time I have "a good idea" like that, somebody stop me!…….. The diving / accommodation package was good, half board in a hotel, no washing up!

If only we could decide how to get there! Ideas ranged from minibus to motorbike, finally settling on flying! Well nearly, after missing out on the available seats from our local airport, desperation led me to Easyjet, flying from Luton to Barcelona, both miles away from our start and finish points!

Still everyone agreed, until I got the tickets! How were we going to get to the airport?
"I wanted to drive through France!" exclaimed one happy traveller.
"Why Luton? Can’t we go from anywhere else?"
This problem finally solved, more questions
"Where is it we are going anyway? Spain?"
"When are we going?"
"What’s the weather like?"
"Where did you say we were going?"
"What are the caravans like?"
Sanity was slipping away!
 
The day finally dawned for us to set off on our adventure, after what felt like hours in the minibus (it was!), we arrived at the airport safe and sound, then promptly left again, because the map was wrong!
The check-in girl deserved a medal, confronted with eleven intrepid travellers, who all did their best to confuse themselves as well as her, she showed remarkable control, apart from the dark threat, "If you’re not careful I’ll tell the guards on the security gate to give you a going over!"

Like all good little divers, we all went straight to our rooms when we arrived at the hotel, it was late after all (11:30), and we were diving in the morning. Twenty minutes later, all the ‘good little divers’ appeared in the bar, then went off exploring the night spots, and playing table football (sad lot!) into the wee small hours.
 
The warm and sunny morning heralded the start to the diving. La Sirena, the diving operation we were with, impressed us with their apparent high level of organisation and punctuality, and took us out for a ‘shake down’ dive. This was presumably to remove spiders from long unused wet suits, and prove to the dive operation, that you could actually find your way back to the boat! Well sometimes at least!

It was also to let the 3-star divers in on their little secret. "You know it states in our literature that ‘all basic grade divers must dive with one of our guides’? (this apparently being Catalan law!), well unfortunately we don’t have any spare, so you will have to look after your own 1-star divers". (Strange how later in the week, when a party of Germans and Spaniards joined the boat, they seemed to have found a new box of guides from somewhere!). This all helped in the unofficial christening of the dive site, ‘Crap cove’!
 
Underwater activity was centred around the Medas (Medes, Catalan spelling!) islands and progressed through the week, with varying levels of excitement, caves, tunnels, boulder strewn slopes, a wreck (!!) and canyons….which were somewhere else!

At the entrance to one of the caves stands a small brass statue of a dolphin, which has apparently been there for many years. How it has survived for so long without being ‘relocated’ by someone suffering from non-ferrous metal syndrome, is something of a mystery. Also how did Ol’ Captain C. get the bubbles to come out of its blowhole?

Apparently it is lucky to kiss the Dolphin, watching some other divers trying to do this , they were lucky if they did kiss it! Must be the parallax distortion caused by their masks, or the fact that there were too many fish in the way!
 
The briefing said "You may encounter Groupers on this dive." It didn’t however prepare us for what that actually meant! With vision obscured by dozens of silvery flashes, as the bream and their allies surrounded you in mid water. The initial thump made me think I had landed on an unseen rock, but it was under my arm, and moving, as the silvery jobs cleared I was confronted with a large, brownish, grumpy looking fish, a few inches from my mask! In no time at all I realised that he wasn’t that big, one of his (or her) larger relatives was soon on the scene, checking us out for food, or from the size of it as food! One of the other divers from the boat actually had her gloved hand engulfed, complete with bag of fish food! The groupers, or gropers as they became known, took a lot of persuading to back off!
 
This was not unlike the young ‘ladies’ encountered by some of our more adventurous members (!?!), on a visit to the "Hottest night club around", the £15 for the 4 beers, should have alerted them that the hall porter’s idea of a ‘night club, with some action’ was a little more extreme than they had expected, and the name ‘Baby Dolls’ was a bit of a give away!

The rest of us chose other forms of relaxation, some just relaxed (mainly in bars!), others went snorkelling with jellyfish to see if they could get stung, while the helpful shore cover lobbed rocks at them! Served him right when he, so gracefully, fell off the rock! By the way the sting seekers were successful!
 
It was all over too soon, but the final day out in Barcelona was worth the wait. The walk down the ‘Ramblas’ through the street market, the ‘Live’ statues, the flower sellers, the bird sellers (not for the conservationists among us!) and on down to the harbour, with old Christopher Columbus, on his own version of Nelson’s column happily pointing away from America(!) was a special experience, as was the ‘Erotic art’ exhibition, so I am told, strange how the furtive figures of the ‘Baby Dolls’ expedition happened to be photographed entering this one! (negatives for sale!)

We boring ones went to the aquarium, and very good it was too, nice ‘T’ shirts (now £300 if you really want it Kate!) and lots of fish, including at least three Sunfish, and more sharks than you could shake a stick at!

The whole Barcelona experience was great, well worth another visit, with or without diving!
Shame there was no food on the flight home, they had forgotten to load it! I still felt sorry for the stewardess who broke the news to, the now starving, Mike.

Thanks Hugh for picking us up from Luton
 
 
 Totnes Sub Aqua Club