Just back from a week in Andalucía (the southernmost part of Spain), with a
couple of days in Gibraltar - which is a bizarre place, serving perfect
sunday roasts in carbon-copy british pubs with palm trees waving in the
heat outside.  And Barbary Apes mugging tourists for their ice cream.

Fitted in a couple of dives with Steve Henshaw of Dive Hire Gibraltar, the
local NAUI operation - mad as a balloon, but hugely knowledgable and the
kind of guy who subscribes to the philosophy that he may do this for a
living, but there is no point if he doesn't enjoy it too...

I was diving with the new SO, who was a bit apprehensive pre-dive - not
having dived since January, nor in water with less than 20m viz, Steve had
the perfect mix of good cop/bad cop to get her into the water to start
enjoying herself.

Dives were done in a four with Mark, a recently arrived UK expat
reluctantly looking for w*rk between dives while his GF supported him... ;-
)  Water temp was 17 degrees, and viz about 10m.  Transport to the shore
dive sites was in an ancient banger of Marks, I lugged my steel BP/wing and
reg over, the hire gear, including newish semi-drys, that we used was in
good nick.

The first dive was a pleasant potter round a couple of purpose-sunk wrecks,
the second the following morning was a rather hard work tour against some
random-direction currents taking in a grand total of eight (!) wrecks.

I was really surprised by the quality of the underwater landscape - the Gib
dive operations are very keen to point out that they actually dive in the
Atlantic, not the fish-free Mediterranean.  There certainly was plenty of
fishlife, most of which I won't attempt to name - but including Flying
Gurnards, Sea Scorpions, Morays and some enormous steroid-muscular
nudibranchs ripping pieces of iron bodily from the wrecks and chewing them
up.  Well, I exaggerate slightly.  We saw a couple of octopuses on both
dives, and the water above the artificial reefs was crowded schools of
little silver and red fish.

Add another to the list of places I must make it back to dive properly some
day... :-)

The afternoon after the second dive, we drove over the hills (1,2000m) to
Ronda (alt. 900 metres) - which wasn't the brightest idea if we had known
beforehand it was quite that high.  But we had been out of the water for
five hours after a non-agressive single dive by then, pushing the
recommendations a bit, but it is a probability game and and we got away
with it this time...

Some good UW photos on Dive Hire's website give an impression of the
conditions:
http://www.jpsmedia.com/divehire/index.html

And some of my dry land photos from Andalucía:
http://www.huwporter.com/tgallery/andalucia.html

Cheers,
Huw
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http://www.huwporter.com