Barranco del Aqua

I had booked three dives for the Friday 2018-12-28 from Aqua Marine dive center at Playa des Americas beforehand by email one week in advance. The whole trip to Tenerife was a last minute ex-tempore escape from the cold and dark winter of Finland. I bought flights to Tenerife just 10 days before the trip. Then decided that I want to dive for one day just to see what it was like to dive there. I did quick google searching and then looked at reviews from various places, like TripAdvisor. Then concluded that Aqua Marine dive center would probably be a good choice for me. I sent 25 € as a deposit by PayPal to secure my booking.

On Friday morning I was picked up from the front of my hotel at 8:50 as promised and then driven to the dive center. There I filled out the paperwork, showed my c-cards and met the dive guide for the first dive. Then got a 15L steel tank filled with air. The dive guide told me that all others were diving with air, so he did not think I should need to use Nitrox. So I decided to go with air too. The guide gave us briefing to the first site. We were going to be a group of 4 and the guide to this site.

I had brought all my own dive gear with me: dry suit, Aqualung Zuma BCD, fins with steel straps, Apex regulator set, Shearwater Predix AI, NaNight Tech2 light, Olympus TG-5 camera in UW housing. So I set all that up and loaded my gear to the truck. I got a dry bag for other gear. The we were taken to the Los Christianos Harbour, where we quickly loaded the RIB boat.

Dive 1: 2018-12-28 Dive-1 Barranco del Aqua, 10:36, 33 min, 34 meters

Dive site was just 10 min boat ride away around the cliffs. On the way I loaded lead from the boat’s lead box to the weight pockets of my BCD. I was guessing for 6 kg, but that proved to be too little. When in water I asked for 1 kg more, but at the end of the dive that also felt too little. On the 2nd dive I took 9 kg and that was perfect. During the first dive I actually had to load some rocks from the bottom to dry suit pockets.

An anchor was thrown from the boat to our planned site, but it seemed that there was some current. The dive guide did tell us to go down by the anchor line due to the strong current. I first did not comply, so he made sure I would. And it was really good that he was strict, because the current was pushing really hard on the way down. The anchor was at 25 meters and we really had to drag our way down there. At the bottom the current wasn’t that bad, so we were able to dive along the bottom and reached the drop off at 34 meters. We were diving pretty deep so after 14 min my Shearwater at GF 30/85 started to show deco, but that is also when we started to ascend along the hill. I did have the camera, but the current was hard and it was hard to take pictures. There was lot of marine life to be seen and visibility was great, about 20 meters. Finally, at 25 min we started to ascend from the bottom. I really had to squeeze my dry suit to a vacuum pack to stay at 6 meter deco depth. 4 min of deco was enough. Apparently most of the group was running low on air, I had I 62 bar left after the 34 min dive. The guide had an Al7 stage with him in case someone running low on air.

The way we re-entered the RIB boat was on ladder at the rear with gear on. Fins and weight belts would be handed to the boat first. Entry to water was by back-roll of course.
I had a dry suit hood on, but decided that it was too much, so I did not use on the later dives. Water was 20 C, and I felt comfortable in my dry suit with just a cotton sweater and sweatpants under. When back at boat, I reloaded the weight pockets to 5 + 4 kg.

We returned to harbor and had a lunch at the Chiringuito beach bar. There we had a briefing for the 2nd dive. We had 90 min of surface time.