6. A quarry, a church, stick man Jesus and some devil rays!

Monday was another day of taking the little car out to explore. I went to another beauty spot view point, this one was called Poço de Pedriera, which translates at ‘Quarry Peak’. It’s really incredible looking peak of a hill with massive rock columns that were the top of an extinct volcano, which at some point was hollowed out and made into a quarry. That is now disused and it’s been flooded and is a massive pond … with more ducks living in it! It also has a massive amount of frogs who sit out on the banks but I found them impossible to photograph because as soon as I got near them, they kamikazed themselves back into the pond. I even put my sensible walking flip flops to good use and walked up the bay of the hills through the little forest and found my way to the top for another viewpoint.

After I’d sweated it out climbing the hill, I made my way on stopping at a couple of sites and viewpoints, including a pretty church up a hill which had a stick man Jesus on a cross - like someone had made a sculpture of a child’s drawing. They also had all of the stations of the cross depicted along tiles that went up the steps towards the church. (I learnt all about the stations when I was at Catholic school and Sister Mary Elise made me and the y12 class walk round the church for an hour while she told us the story they depict - I’m fairly confident that they depict the journey to the crucifixion. I think there are 12 pictures which I imagine end with either Jesus dying or coming back to life again. They’re not full of engaging details - I’m pretty sure a lot of them are ‘Jesus fell over’ … and again …. And again. Despite that thrilling interlude, I continued on my way on to another of the little bay, which had another excellent lido type sea pool where I cooled off, read my book and drank my tea in the sunshine! For dinner, I went to the trip advisor number 3 best places to eat and had fish and chips. It was a terribly busy day!

*****

My final day of diving took me to the other dive site I had on my bucket list for this trip - Ambrósio, this time only a 20 minute and fairly smooth rib ride out to the site which is 3 miles off shooed to the north of the island. The site goes to 50m depth and there are a couple of permanent mooring lines that boats anchor onto, which go from the seabed up to the surface. It’s a site popular for devils rays. Dependent on the current, divers either stay close to, hang on to or clip onto the anchor lines. When we arrived the site, the surface buoy was bobbing up and down above / below the surface, which means there was a lot of current (because it was pulling so much on the line, it was pulling the buoy down). In buddy pairs, each pair got their own current line to clip onto the main anchor line. I was buddied with a man who had one of those MASSIVE cameras. When we had the brief and were told you must clip and hold onto the line, he just kept saying ‘but I’ve got a camera and I need two hands to film with it. The guide repeated that you must hold onto the line and he kept repeating ‘but I need two hands for my camera’. … ok then mate, don’t hold on and swept away you will be. Not great loss! After this, I voiced my concerns about being a buddy with the camera man because he wouldn’t be much of a buddy. At this point, the man said ‘It’s ok, you don’t have be at all responsible for my safety’. I responded, quite calmly I felt: ‘right, ok, but if you’re my buddy, you are supposed to be a little responsible for my safety’ and told the guide I wasn’t happy to officially buddy with the absolute moron (I kept that name in my head). Fortunately, I got given my own current line, camera was given his own (which he then didn’t use!) and I was fine, with the guide promising to keep an eye on me!

At this site with the current, when you back roll off the boat, you hold onto a ‘boat current-line’ so that when you surface and get caught by the surface current, you don’t get whisked away. Holding on hand and over hand you then pull yourself along of series of lines until you can grab the buoy line, pull along then, let the air out and descend, always holding onto the anchor line. Once you get to the depth you want to be at, you attach your personal line onto the main anchor line, clip the other end on to your jacket .., and relax. The current pulls you all out so you’re waggling about in the current like human flags! I was down for a long dive (73 minutes - surfaced with only 65 bar of air in my tank (started with 200 bar) and you should aim never to surface with less than 50 ideally, just in case) and felt slightly panicked as I so rarely get close to the 50! At times, the current eased so you could swim about a bit (always attached to the mainline so in a little circle just to get away from other divers and to play in the lighter current (well, that’s what I did!) and other times, mega current blew through and you could feel it whizzing by pulling on your air tube and pulling all the lines taut. The beautiful devil rays that breezed by (always against the current with their feeders open catching all the plankton being swept towards them) seem totally unaffected by it. At one point, one of the rays came up really close to the back of all our legs (less than a couple of metres away) and just stayed there for ages, presumably watching us and interested in the weird sight we much have been!

My buddy that never was ended up mostly arms round the anchor line and didn’t look very comfortable but it was his choice not to take his line or clip on properly. At one point, he came off the line to swim to something to photograph it, and of course, as soon as he starting taking photos, lost concentration and begun to float away and then, as is typical with the ‘big camera divers’, ignored / didn’t hear the increasingly frantic dive guide who was calling him. Fortunately there wasn’t mega strong current at the time and the guide swam out to him, got his attention and made him swim back the line. Once back on the surface, he got an absolute - and totally deserved - bollocking for that. If a big current had blown through, he’d had been whisked away. In this instance the guide would first return to the boat (leaving us all unsupervised but hopefully fine and all keeping at eye on each other, as responsible divers to), get the massive long rope and launch it into the water for the diver to grab. If he’d been pulled too far or there wasn’t time for that, all the other 11 of us would have been called back to the boat (which with the unclipping of lines, safe ascent and all heaving ourselves back onto the boat would have taken a good 10-15 minutes) then we’d have sailed in the boat to go to try and find the drifting diver. I’ve got no idea if he had a personal surface buoy that he could inflate and waggle about to make himself more visible. I’d like to think he would have (I always dive with mine in my pocket for emergencies) but who knows. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, he swam and was towed back to the line and then told off on the boat. What a fool though - and putting himself and potentially everyone else at risk … all because he needs 2 hands for his camera and can’t see past that. I knew I was right to say I wouldn’t buddy with him; I didn’t want to be responsible for keeping an eye and helping him - or going after him if he drifted and he certainly wouldn’t have been aware of my location or general safety either!

Second dive (following a surface interval with more ‘tea’, delicious bread and some biscuits) was ‘just’ to some rocks and little pinnacles to see the lobsters, moray eels and little fish. After washing all the kit and treating myself to lunch, I had the afternoon by the pool having hung everything out to dry ready for packing. There is a lack of rails or places to hang and dry stuff here but there are some lovely little trees just outside my room that I utilised! Tomorrow will be a final day of lunch and taking myself to one of the little bays I think then an evening flight back on the toy plane back to the big island before a fairly early flight back to the UK on Thursday.

What a holiday it’s been - quite different in Europe to Asia for so many reasons but some excellent diving, exploring and a couple of weeks in the sunshine…now to start planning my next adventure!