Scubamoose

Date : 26th July 2008
Time : 53 mins
Depth : 14.6m
Temp : 15 C

Mouro Island is a marine nature reserve just off the port of Santander in Northern Spain.  The water is pretty cold as this coastline is exposed to the Atlantic and I did expect the water to be clearer.  The visibility was about 7 to 8 meters.

This was my brother-in-law’s first dive for quite a while, he last dived with me in Tenerife 2 years ago.  We sat down the night before and went through out of air and other drills, touching on subjects like the type of boat we would be diving from and keeping a close eye on air consumption.  He has done 50 dives and his experience showed as we discussed everything,

Anyway we zoomed out to the Island on a modern fast rib with 12 divers on board.  We dived with Acquatur, the only dive center I could find in the area before we went to Spain.  They have a good setup, plenty of equipment and everything looked like it had been properly taken care of, a far cry from some of the dive centers I have used in the past!

All the local divers put thier kit on in the water and didn’t do buddy checks.  We put all our kit on sitting on the side of the rib and did a full buddy check, then fell over backwards into the cool water.  I checked my buddy’s air a few times in the first 15 minutes and his air consumption was very good, he certainly seemed relaxed as we proceeded with our dive.

We saw fish, nudibranchs and towards the end of the dive I also spotted an octopus.  There was also a large conger eel hiding in a deep hole in the rocky island.  We did lose the diveleader who was diving with us after about 40 mins.  We knew he wouldn’t worry, he was aware of our experience and he was too busy taking photos, but we surfaced a couple of hundred meters from the boat and ended a lovely dive with a slow steady surface swim.