Diving 2006

Photoalbum Grevelingen

Diving

 

Dive in The Netherlands: Grevelingen lake: Saturday July 1, 2006

We leave early in the morning from Sint-Amands: Mike, Eef and Timo. We drive to Walem to pick up our diving equipment. Everything was ready in the van. Rudy had to take everything out and we load everything in the car of Mike. He’ll drive, since he has a company car. The gathering was on the carpool parking of Kontich along the E19 to Antwerp, so in the right direction. Danny De Mars is there already and we’re the only ones joining. We leave for Scharendijke. It takes about an hour to get there, via Zierikzee and Goes, in the small village Scharendijke at the so-called “babbling reef”, there is also a dive shop ‘Kabbelaar’. First we go out and check the lake out and Danny tells us what we’re going to do; where we will dive and what we will see. “Maybe we see lobsters”, he said. We prepare for our dive, get our gear on, buddy check and walk over the hill and then go into the water.  It’s not the easiest way, but we manage. We see a lot of lobsters, small to medium sized, but not the really big and old ones Danny was speaking about. We see a lot of hermit crabs, oysters, unbelievable. Jellyfish are spotted here too, North Sea crabs, sea squirts, starfish. We are really surprised we see that many animals here; we never expected that big diversity. Also young cod and shrimps. We surface about 40 minutes later, because we ran out of air. We are not used to stay under water that long yet, we still consume much air. That will change once we have more experience, people tell us. But for now we’re done, especially because Mike was already breathing with Danny for the last 15 minutes. They had given us a bad regulator. That is a lesson for the next time, either we need to ask for a spare one or we need to test it. Eef quickly checks out the reef balls and stays in the water 15 minutes longer than us. There it is beautiful too, but Mike and I keep this for the next time, because that will surely come. We fill out our logbooks on the terrace of “The Kabbelaar”, drink something, speak about which animals we saw and at 14:30 we return to Belgium. The trip back is OK and fast; we still need to stop by Walem to drops the gear. This is our first dive after we got our certificate and then we rent it for free. That’s cool. See you next time, Grevelingen!