Haphazard Trip, Birthday in Genova

[rslomkow]

Well my birthday was this last weekend and I decided what better way to celbrate than by going to the ocean and doing some diving. Things did not go as well as hoped. I didn't get the OK to take Monday off from work until Thursday, so I didn't schedule anything until Friday. 7hr drive from Munich to Portofino. I did not realize that you can only get to diving areas of the park by boat until about Noon! Found several dive "shops" that were very unhelpful and just do stock SCUBA trips, and thought I was weird for wanting to do Apnea in -20-30m deep water.

So I cut my losses and decided to just pay the insane parking fee (14 Euro for 3 hours) at the resort town; go to the public beach and get under the water. I had spent too much time driving back and forth, trying to find the mysterious road that didn't exist and using up my 20 words of Italian.

The water was at least a comfy 23C, clarity could have been better, but at least it was the ocean. Even if it took me a while to find -19m of water where I didn't feel like a boat was going to be driving over me every time I surfaced.

Staying close to an underwater cliff by a point was a good way to keep away from boats.

Most of the diving was pretty fun, nothing pushing myself -14-19m dives, 45-80 seconds. Nice Sea Jelly in 1-2m of water.

Lessons learned:

1) plan better!
2) expect European tourist destinations to be very structured (poor just find a place to park and get in the water)
3) try to get in the water earlier!

If you want to see some of my attempts to use a digital camera to do personal diving videos http://www.dailymotion.com/rslomkow/apnea+portofino

#1 just goofing around, cannot read my watch at around -16m
#2 going down in the blue seems rather boring for video
#3 following bubbles is a nice way to come back up


Seems like a nice place to dive, but not a place to pull off the side of the road, requires planning.