New Dive sites in Tenerife :-)

Week 6! It is not even my favourite number but what a week it was!

Packed with diving and not just normal fun recreational diving, but fun new experiences!

First two dives of the week were Santa dives :)

I had never ever thought of diving in a costume and if I ever had I would have never thought it would be with a full Santa costume on a boat with 7 other Santas singing Feliz Navidad on their way to yellow mountain waving to other speed boats riding their way back to the marina.
And it was fun and the mood was great, can't wait to see the pictures of all the Santas underwater. Unfortunately I did not manage to keep anything from the costume to keep as a souvenir, but I guess the pics will do just fine.

The following day was just a very short day at the shop. Everyone went to San blas after the santa dives to properly celebrate Alice's new instruction certification and I heard it was so much fun.

We all showed up at 2:00 pm in the shop the next day for our kit set up and pre dive safety check skills, I scored 5 in the first but had to repeat the other one another day because I did it too fast. I practiced it a couple of times though this week and I will definitely do much better next time.

Pete and Melissa took off for their holidays on Monday.

We headed to Abades for 3 dives.  Dennis led the first dive by taking us to a different route where Andreas somehow managed to see a severely disguised octopus that was even hiding under a rock.

Then, we saw a big cuttle fish sleeping and burying itself under the sand. There were lots of lizard fish, scorpion fish and the very territorial blue damsel fish.
I was leading the second dive Where we went to the small caves up north and saw the cardinal fish and I loved the anemones
Lydia was leading our last 40 min dive.

The day ended with a great debrief, everyone was happy for a smooth, easygoing and fun day.

I woke up the next morning getting myself ready to dive in las eras. the first time I ever been there was on my first day of my internship.
The horizon was just so beautiful with the sun shining above us.
We found some cuttlefish, Andreas found yet another hiding octopus then we reached a current but we managed to swim our way through it.

On the third dive though we found the pipeline in the first 5 mins. The visibility was excellent and it was nothing like I had imagined really, was just a medium sized pipeline in the middle of huge blocks of concrete placed next to each other and it spread for as far as I could see for the whole duration of the dive. Was an exceptionally great experience as you just glide effortlessly guided by the pipeline just beneath you. And between each concrete block and the next you find something great, loads of scorpion fish of different sizes, lots of morays (black and brown) there was an amazing moray that was so curious and kept getting so close could almost touch my mask's glass.

We found out that we are going to El Puertito during the debrief after Las Eras diving experience.
We were all so excited for doing another project aware dive and hopefully see the turtles if we were lucky.
We were supposed to collect as many rubbish as we can from the shallow waters where the turtles live, it was for the sake of the environment, the turtles and the future of the dive site.

You would be amazed of how much rubbish you could find, it's just a sad thing that we are the enemies of our own environment. Many people forget that without the ocean there would be no life as we know it on planet earth.
After one hour of collecting rubbish and playing with turtles we came out with 4 sacks completely filled with rubbish.

This was apparently very inspiring for all the locals sitting on that cafeteria down the beach to find 5 divers very early in the morning coming out of the water with bags full of garbage.
They even asked me why we do that and an answer as simple as to clean the beach and have a good impact on the environment put a simple yet genuine smile on their faces and a rewarding feeling for myself.
On the third dive we were followed by the turtles, swimming right next to us for at least 50 metres then going and coming back to check us out every now and again. Could have never asked for more :)

We wanted to discover a new dive site.

It turned out to be a very nice dive site. There is a lot of octopus there and many huge starfish and a few cuttlefish. It's not that deep,  the deepest I guess was 10 metres where the cool rock formations were.
We even took some fun pics sitting there next to each other all the interns. We ended the day by snorkeling in the rain and doing some fish ID.

All in all this week was one of my most favorite weeks, everything was running smooth and everything was easy and we all had a lot of fun. Looking forward for the next week!