If you live in an inland city and your hobby is scuba diving, and to make it more difficult, you are a poor student, then your chances to enjoy your favourite sport often are not too many. So, join a club, pick some friends, rent the equipment you don’t own in your own club, and pack a car with four people for a one day trip to the near Mediterranean Sea to do three infantry dives and almost 600 Km. there and back. Sounds tiring, but this is the price of the adventure.

            After making the same trip a few times, you learn that if it is windy in our city, we know we have to be in the water before 11-12 a.m., otherwise the breeze starts to blow from the sea and it turns a bit unquiet. We used to go to small beach among low cliffs, sheltered even in windy days at the beginning of spring, and never too crowded. After loading all the equipment on our backs, full diving gear with a 12 l. tank, we went down the stairs and reached the water across the sand. Once there, we still had to swim may be 150m to a more interesting rocky area. It is not very deep there, hardly 10-12 metres. If during the dive you reach a deeper point, let’s say 14m., that means you went really far, and that around you there will be only high grass. Still it was in a place like this full of grass, where I saw the biggest and nicest sea slug ever. A strange black creature with a brigh blue stain between the wings. This area is the other hand it is a nice place, plenty of fish if you know where to look for it, what was our case as I know every stone under the water, including a nice wide cave where there is always large fish. In the last occasions I even discovered where to find small lobsters that many people consider extinct in that area. Paying attention there is lots of small life around, with surprises of bigger pelagic fish from time to time.

After a first dive, we used to have a sandwich on the beach, and a nap under a big pine tree, till we waited for the wind to change again and do the following dive more or less in the same area. After the second dive we had another break and ate a few snacks, and at dusk we did the final dive when it was already dark under the water. At night it is possible seeing the animals you can hardly see during the day, like small prawns, sea snails or more curious octopuses that even let you touch them if you approach them very carefully. There is always something special in night dives, where you see only a circle of light in front of you, and the silvered shine of fish around you.

            Finally tired, with our air tanks exhausted after three shallow dives, we returned home satisfied, commenting what we saw under the water and thinking we should try to put some money together to go to a proper diving site once in a while. Despite all the inconveniences, I have good memories of those express trips.