Fuerteventura 31st August to 14th September

This was not specifically a diving holiday, but more of a family holiday where I go diving. These dive excursions were generally confined to the mornings of every second day, then it was back to lie by the pool for the rest of the day. 

For the dives I used Corralejo Dive Center which was set up my Miguel Abella in 1979 and he was joined by Marta Elizalde in 1985. Marta was on the boat with us each day and dived on a couple of occasions, while mostly our dive guide was Mikel Redin. The best thing about using this dive centre was that all dives are boat dives, whereas most other did mostly shore dives. In total I did 11 dives which cost me €245. 

What I liked about the dive guides is that they treated experienced divers as having common sense and despite being a PADI centre, did not insist on compulsory buddy checks, snorkels etc. I was most surprised when on one dive the dive guide took a student back to the surface, along with another diver who wanted to go up, he signalled to me that if I wanted I could stay down by myself. This offer was taken up and I stayed down for a further 25 minutes. 

There are no wrecks in the area that we dived so it was one reef after another, considering that the sites were mostly fairly close together there was a considerable variety of flora and fauna to be seen. 

As can be seen from the table the diving was not particularly deep, with only one dive over 30 metres. However as my air usage is quite good (averaging a SAC of 13 litres per minute on this trip) and not able to get nitrox I was always running up against time limits for no decompression dives. This would not normally be a problem, however I am not keen on doing deco without an adequate redundant air supply. The second dives were even tighter on these limits, especially on the odd occasion where we were down to 20 metres again, as we had relatively short surface intervals, typically 1 hour 15 minutes. 

Most of the other divers were Spanish with the exception of 2 people from Dublin, Justin and Aiobheann (pronounced Even, God knows how)