My moral ethical commitment with you and the passion for the sea that I feel inside did not let me spend a weekend without diving, so I had two choices: go by myself or try to find another area where the sea would allow us to enjoy diving. Something good in the Galician Rias is that whether in a shore is bad, in the other one it is warm, so I decided to call Santi, manager of Bahía-Sub dive center in O Grove.
We met at 9.30 am in the center with hope to get into somewhere still undetermined... but it looks like we are going to be lucky: the sea is practicable. When we reached the port, we went on board a 8.5 m semi-rigid boat, one of the two boats that are available-in Bahía-Sub, and decided to dive in a place that Santi has called ”O Cabaliño Sur” and that is in the midst of a polygon in front of Porto Meloxo, 1 mile far NE.
It is a place composed of granite rock that forms small and medium-sized caves where sheltering large Labrus Bergyltia, spider crabs, crabs, octopus... shelter, and that has areas of gravel around. “O Cabaliño” is 6 m deep at the beginning, which is the big top of the bedrock, ideal for the safety stop. The maximum depth is 14 m, so it becomes an ideal dive for those without much experience and who want to know Galician bottoms.
Once in the dive area, Santi assignes mates to us and makes a small briefing of what we are going to find, and also he reminds us the importance of buoyancy control to avoid damaging the environment when we find gorgonians.
Just after going down I see the wonder Smith had talked about only two minutes ago. 8 m. deep, we are in the middle of a small pod of annular seabream (Diplodus annularis) and among them I can see a beautiful bream (Sparus aurata) weighting approximately 1 kg. Furthermore, this was the first time that I could take a picture of this species here.
VISIBILITY OF 16 FEET AND WATER AT 15ºC
Despite being completely cloudy and looking like it was going to rain, visibility is not so bad around 16 feet deep, although there is much less clarity 2 m deep and water temperature is 15ºC. Dive goes on and Bruno shows me a beautiful cave in which there are some big wrasse that are looking us from the other end.
On the side of the beautiful cave we find “the grandmother” of the crabs (Necora puber) accompanied by a female cukoo wrasse (Labrus bimaculatus) and two small bartenders goldsinny wrasse (Ctenolabrus rupestris) that seem to enjoy our presence as well as I enjoy them.
A bit ahead I continue amazing when I see a beautiful cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) that starts to run away when I swim over it, as we are coming back. Without realizing it, 50 minutes have passed and although there are still 150 bars in my 12x300bar, my mate Bruno begins to feel cold.
When we arrive at the end of the anchoring, while doing the safety stop, a shoal of bream surrounds us and I take the last pictures, unfortunately, our waters do not allow us to take that kind of pictures in which the diver is surrounded by the shoal…
The dive finishes and so the article, but first I would like to thank you that you have put your trust in me. The pictures are new in each article and they are all taken on just one dive, as this one I have told you.
Thanks to Santi and people from Bahía-Sub for being so nice. I hope you like this article and I remind you that you can contact me or the magazine to ask for the dive you want, sending an email to: jacoboalonso@horminor.com.
Text and pictures: Jacobo Alonso.
(http://fotosub-jacoboalonso.blogspot.com/)
We have dived with: www.bahia-sub.com
(10-11-09) Second winter dive in the Ria de Arousa (Spain). Our correspondent in Galician Rias submerges us in a low place in front of the peninsula of O Grove. Outside, the weather is not good, but under the surface we are finding an area of small caves where large Labrus Bergyltia, spider crabs, crabs, octopus... shelter.