Deborah and I decided it had been far too long since we had been diving; our last ones were in October 2021! Eager to do things correctly, we booked our refresher dives with Omega Divers for this morning.
After the mandatory form filling and waiting for the briefing for the Discover Scuba Diving participants to finish, we loaded our kit onto the pickup and boarded the minibus. We arrived at Koutalas Beach after about 10 minutes, driving down a very steep, narrow and winding track. No goats were harmed on our journey, honest!
The beach is in a delightful bay providing shelter from the breeze and is a definite sun-trap. It is made up of large round pebbles and stones and has a very gentle gradient into the water. Like many in Crete, it is people in the know who visit, mainly small families with young children and couples. And us divers, of course.
We kitted up quickly, eager to get out of the sun. Once in the cool water and after a few skills checks (mask clearing and regulator recovery and clearing) we set off for an underwater tour of the bay. Down the right hand side we passed over and around large boulders. After crossing the fairly sparse entrance to the bay we came to a large trench at the bottom of the wall. We swam up this, over the very large boulders in it until we got to about 5m. A gentle swim towards our exit point took care of the safety stop and soon we were surfacing and back in the sweltering heat on the beach.
All through the dive there were plenty of fish. We have dived Elephants Cave/Lighthouse wall and Marathi/Minnewaska wreck over the last 3 years and have never seen so much sealife.
Now it’s time to book some more boat dives for us, and for family who are coming out in a couple of weeks.