Santorini Diving. June 5, 2015

Last week we traveled to Santorini to meet up with my birth mother, Janice. Since we were going for 5 nights, we thought we should sample the diving in Greece, especially since we've both been longing to go diving again, after too long of a break from it.

We chose Santorini Dive Center, but decided to start off by only booking a 2-tank dive the day after we arrived. If Santorini surpassed our rather low expectations, diving-wise, we could add some more diving later in our trip. Spoiler alert: we dove just the one day.

Dive 1: by boat to the Old Volcano (Palea Kameni). The shop owner, Paul, led this dive which is mainly to see the volcanic rock formations. This was just rocks to me, nothing unusual or startling. And very little marine life, which is the main reason we love to SCUBA dive. All we really saw were sponges, spirograph worms, and a couple of schools of very small fish.

Dive 2: by shore on the house reef at Caldera Beach, near Akrotiri. DM was Marc Lopez. This was the better of the two dives. Firstly, because there was much more sea-life here. We saw some great nudibranchs and some small but colourful wrasse and parrotfish, and one medium-sized barracuda. Since this was a Greek Islands dive, it was cool to see a large, undamaged amphora (a huge pot with two handles near the mouth). The other reason I enjoyed this dive more was because my buoyancy improved a lot after the previous dive and working out the kinks from not diving for awhile.

First: 1st Mediterranean Dive (temperate water)

This is the TripAdvisor review I wrote about the shop.
Dive Report I posted on ScubaBoard (a bit more detailed than above, but similar).