Warm Water Dive - First Find Your Dive Centre! April 20, 2006
Posted by wannabemermaid in : Life, The Universe And Everything , 1 comment so farI spent a week this month ‘demonstrating’ on a field trip to Tenerife, this mainly involved being enthusiastic about rocks at a group of undergraduates who were really more interested in almost anything else! Despite this I had a fabulous time, especially since I find it disturbingly easy to be enthusiastic about rocks, in fact, difficult not to be when I am living around a not quite inactive volcano! We were staying in Playa de Las Americas (urghh - wouldn’t reccommend it!) and I was midly entertained by wondering how many other people staying in the resort realised that the ‘hill’ that separates it from Los Christianos is actually a small volcanic cone!
So, how does the diving enter into this? Well they gave us all a half day on Saturday and whilst the students were working diligently back at the hotel I managed to cram a dive in! This was a little more tricky than I expected. The lady on reception directed me to a dive centre in Los Christianos, I was suprised that there wasn’t one closer but walked over there anyway. When I found them they told me that it not being peak season, they weren’t taking a boat out for a 3rd dive but could offer me a shore dive. I declined politely (too hot to be trudging round the sand in a wetsuit in my view and they admitted that there wasn’t much to see). The helpful dive centre (I wish I could remember their name) then called around for me to see if anyone did have a boat going out.
Success, a centre in Puerto Colon had a trip going at 3pm and they would book me on. It was now 2.15pm and Puerto Colon is at the other end of the resort, back through Los Christianos and Las Americas. I arrived, hot, slightly sunburnt and with a grazed knee having fallen over my own flip-flops, at 2.55pm. I then of course discovered that things were running on Canarian time and spent half an hour in a cafe drinking nice cold orange juice before returning to kit up!
My dive buddies turned out to be another university student and a UK dive instructor who spent much of his time at Stoney. Ironically we then went out in the boat back past Los Christianos to a small rocky reef the other side! To be honest, it wasn’t the best dive I have done in Tenerife but it was wonderful to be back in a wetsuit and be able to peer head down at something without me feet trying to drag me to the surface. It was shallow, starting at 4m and decsending to around 10m following the reef out to sea along it’s base. We saw a fair number of fish, wrasse and a couple of things that I couldn’t identify. We also saw sea spiders which i find fascinating but the highlight was a fin sticking up through the sand which we hovered and watched for a while and just after my buddies had given up on it and turned around, give a wriggle and revealed itself to be a large ray. I reisted the temptation to prod it and left it to lie in the sand in peace. It was still there when we came back past it. We came back to the anchor line and pootled around to a bit before one of my buddies decided that she was short of air and wanted to ascend. By then I was starting to feel just a little chilly and it seemed like a good idea to me.
We zipped back to the dive centre and got ourselves de-kitted. Fortunately one of my buddies was staying near to me and we shared a taxi back allowing me to saunter into the hotel just 5 minutes late for my ‘help the students’ session in the bar. Mind you, I hate to think what they thought I had been up to all afternoon when I came back in with that silly grin I get from diving 
I will put some photos of Tenerife in the surface section of this site as soon as I get round to resizing them etc.
Until then, just one of Mt Teide
