(24-11-09) In the third dive in Galicia (Spain), weather is still unsettled and areas of low pressures came after another, but Jacobo leads us to a rocky place in front of the cove between Insuela and Pameira, in the North shore of the Ría de Arousa.

    As you can check in the news, many areas in Spain are suffering from storms, like the Canary Islands, where they are having problems. Here… although it has been calm during the week, like always, weather at the weekend has got worse.

    I have spent the whole week trying to convince a friend of mine who has a dive center to go to dive, but I did not succeed… So, I asked him for loading my bottle, and he told me that I was crazy.

    As a Spanish saying says, “who wants it, does it”, so I have taken advantage of the situation to show you all what I had talked about in the previous article. In the Rías, if sea is rough in one shore… looking in the opposite shore, something can be done.

    Knowing this, on Saturday afternoon I drove to a place that allowed me to enter the sea from land. I had to choose a very calm place, as one thing is enjoying the sea, and a different one to risk the body.

    To do so, I had to look for a place that allowed me a good access by car, to facilitate the entrance in the sea with the camera and the equipment on my back. The best place to this weekend was in Insuela, a little harbour, almost inactive due to the fact that it is quite shallow and has a lot of rocks, and it is almost exclusively used for small fishing and pleasure boats.

    In the pictures we can see the difference between a place in the coast and other one in the opposite side, where I have dived this time. In ten minutes we can go from one place to the other one, a distance of 15 km.

    The day was cloudy but not rainy, but the wind, which cools the air to 14ºC, makes it a bit uncomfortable. I didn’t want to dive on my own, so I phoned Outeiral, my friend since… the school.

    Outi, as I call him, was note very interested in the plan because he has brought his dry suit to boxes during the bad weather, to change the neck and muffs, but in the end, being a good friend, he decided to came and use his modular wetsuit, 7+5 mm.

SEARCHING THE CALMER AREA OF THE COVE

    We agreed on how to do it: he was going to be in charge of carrying the marker buoy and of helping me to look for animals. We also agreed on the fact that, if we had any little problem because of the current under the sea, the dive would have finished. We always search the calmer area in the little cove that forms the port. Before entering the water we fixed the alarm in the computers in 10 meters and 60 minutes. Any precaution is more than enough.

    Once in water we didn’t know what we could find, since we have never dived there and didn’t know anyone who has done it. Just our intuition and experience told us how it could be. Sandy bottom, covered in the “lettuce of the sea” in continuous movement, with small rounded rocks without caves, or small and elongated caves, as in the surface.

    Visibility was not more than 1.5 m., everything was full of “chickpeas” suspended, and the day light didn’t help much either. Once the route was charted to the islet in the surface, we decided to go down.

    At the beginning I don’t see any interesting to take a picture of, just a pair of soles that hide under the “lettuces” and so beyond my lens. We follow the route, thinking of “where we will end” because the port wrap begins to disappear and you notice the groundswell, which makes our swimming be lateral and with no reference in the bottom.

    When we arrive to a small rock that in fact was wreck of one of the small boats that take shelter in the harbour, Outi shows me the precious Hypeselodorus cantabrica that you see in the picture and that can’t run away until I take a series of pictures.

    Altough the visibility is quite poor and I cannot show you any picture of the environment, water temperature is quite nice: 14ºC, and I am not cold at all, although Outerial seems to be.

    We continues swimming unknowing where we go, with the help of the compass but aware that we turn to the left to what I think is the bottom of the islet. The presences od stones and rocks is aboundant.

FIRST MEETING 8 METERS DEEP

    Once there, when seeing the presence of algae that we call “golfos”, I realize that I am not very deep, just 8 meters deep. When I up my head I see an image that I couldn’t let escape, an Inachio falagin in a position that makes it look wonderful, very beautiful.

    Looking this scene and the animals around, I am confident that some other nudibranch, conger, crab or spider crab (very abundant in the area of Palmeira). I try to take a picture of some Labrus Bergyltia, but they are too far to take a good picture.

    But the smallest fishes let me bring closer, and they are not ugly for being smaller, the only difference is that my position to take the picture is much more complicated, like the one you see here of a “Leptonganster”, as I called it, the Aplotodon dentatus that, with its only 2 cm long and its position on a stone, I am not allowed to take a better picture. When I am diving around the small rock where it is to try to take better angle for the picture, I find this nudibranch. It is a diaphodoris luteocintha that is feeding on hydrozoa.

    While I am taking the pictures to this nudibranch, my clock stars to sound, and I fast realize that I have been diving for one hour and I am a bit hungry, so we decide to came back and start our way back to the beach but following the rocks, so that it bring us close to the beach but looking things.

    The comeback would have been bored if we hadn’t met a small pulp that seemed not to be afraid of us although it kept the security distance of 1 m. I got to take a good series of pictures, but only the one you see is valid.

    Then, my glasses filled with water and not because they were loose or broken… but because of laugh, for seeing my mate holding the buoy with his right hand as if it were a Disney’s balloon. In the shore, I asked him while laughing the reason to hold the buoy that way. It was simple: the rope got entangled.

    Well friends, this is all for the moment. I hope you have enjoyed it and that you slowly discover Galicia. Like always, I want to remind you that you can ask for a dive, to the magazine or to this address: jacoboalonso@horminor.com