By Antonia Panayotova
Once of our newest members and newly qualified Sports Divers reports back on her first club trip. I can’t pretend it was a taste of things to come …
Dear reader, make yourself a drink, find a comfy spot and strap in for what I hope to be a not-too-long, somewhat interesting read about Clidive’s July getaway to Galicia and my first trip with the club.
It all started on a fateful Thursday afternoon – 3rd July to be exact. As many of us were preparing to take the Stansted Express to take a simple 2h flight to Vigo in N.W. Spain, we discovered that the Stansted Express was temporarily out of action. But that’s okay as there are buses of course. And as many of us planned to be at the airport extra early to start our holidays, some of us decided that leaving for a 1h journey to the airport 3.5h before the flight should be enough.
But of course cancelled trains mean bus delays and overbooking. I did make it onto a bus about 1h after it was supposed to leave, then watched it get even more delayed as people were fighting over who got a seat at the next stop. After an hour of nervously checking journey ETAs, we got to Stansted … 30 min before the flight was due to leave.
Of course our flight was departing from the furthest gate that could be assigned. Like many of you, I have travelled a fair amount, but I have never before got through the whole of a crowded airport in 20 minutes! But I did, and even though the boards said the gate was already closed, I just about made it to what felt like the cheers you get at the end of a marathon.
All was well that ends well, seatbelts were fastened and the flight prepared to leave. But no! We were told that, due to a strike by French air traffic controllers, we now had to wait 2 hours on the tarmac to get a slot. Thankfully, we did actually leave. [Unlike poor Stefano, whose flight to Santiage was cancelled completely – he never made it to Galcia… Ed]. Marta and David, the advance party, met us at Vigo loaded with delicious empanadas and after another 30-minute journey – 10 minutes of which were stuck behind a bin collection truck – we made it.
I’m sure you didn’t come here to read about transport problems so I’ll wrap up and move on to the trip, which involved three days of diving and eating our way through Vigo – and how glorious was that!
First the diving highlights:
- It was cold, I haven’t dived off the UK coast much, but many said it is very similar, some suggested even slightly colder. But cold it was, yet totally worth it.
- There were so many octopuses! Many very large and completely out in the open, chilling, staring back at us. I loooved it!
- We even spotted a cuttlefish, which was pretty cool too! And thanks to Marta, I did eventually see it, despite thinking she was crazy for staring at the sand for a minute or so.
- There were a LOT of nudibranchs. I had no idea these existed before this trip and they are so great! I prefer to call them ‘the Pokemon of the sea’ and I swear the Pokemon creators must have been inspired by them!
- I also loved seeing some conger eels hiding behind rocks. They were so large and cool! [Actually, not just ‘so large’ – at least one was an absolute monster! Ed.]
- We dived a mussel farm and loved looking up and seeing how the light tries to break through the ropes covered in mussels. It was a magical sight!
- There were gorgeous kelp forests that you could just swim through and feel like you were getting lost in amazing outer planet landscape.
- And one of our newest Ocean Divers, Sabrina, did her first dives in the ocean!
And because a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a selection of some of the best photos, with thanks to David Chavarria and Matt Brown.
But many of us were equally excited by the food! Notably:
- That a tapa in Galicia is a big meal that you share among a few people. So when we all ordered an average of three tapas per person on the first night, we had enough food for about three times the number in the group…
- That the empanadas, the tortillas, the seafood – everything – was just amazing
- That the local beers and wines were delicious. And a new Clidive ‘toast’ was born, namely drinking to ‘Buoyancy!’ because experienced or not we could all relate to that.
But honestly there isn’t that much to say about the food, it is rather one to show. Hope you aren’t reading this hungry.
I feel like this is already pretty long so I’m going to abruptly end it here. If you are craving more, we should soon hear about the Azores, where some of the group went straight from the Galicia weekend. Thanks for bearing with me and thanks Clidive for a fabulous first club trip!
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