Sardinia

Sardinia is known for both its good-quality Mediterranean diving and its Italian hospitality. DIVE readers give their verdicts. Interviews by Kate Quarry. Photographs by Franco Banfi


Che bella cosa - Ronny Burk

Ronny Burk, 40, works as a computer analyst for an international bank, and learned to dive ten years ago. He lives in Manchester.

I visited the Capo Galera Diving Centre in Fertilia, which is near Alghero in the northwest of Sardinia. It’s not a big diving centre, and the three owners are German, but obviously speak Italian and English as well. Capo Galera was recommended to me by friends, and I went there with a group of friends at the end of July.
The diving centre owns a large villa on the coast, built in the Fifties, which is where we stayed: it can accommodate about 30 people. You each have your own room, but share the kitchen, and it has a private area outside, so you can relax without seeing any other tourists apart from the others staying in the villa. The building is right on the seafront, so you can swim and snorkel there.

All the dive sites are reached by boat, which is an old diesel fishing boat, and you can get to all the sites in between ten minutes and half an hour, with the boat going at a leisurely pace. The water was astonishingly clear but, compared to the Red Sea, the fish life isn’t very rich. You don’t see sharks or big fish, although there are a lot of octopus and moray eels. What’s really nice is the landscape. There are very steep limestone cliffs that extend underwater, where erosion has caused a lot of caves and caverns – which are really the reason to dive there. In some places you can enter a cave underwater, swim for 15 to 20m, and then surface and walk around inside the cave, looking at all the stalagmites and stalactites – an amazing experience, as the only entrance and exit to the cave is underwater. I didn’t have any special training to do this, but put my trust in the local dive guides, and we were fully briefed beforehand. There are lots of easy caves for anyone who is worried about diving in narrow or long caves.

The fish life inside the caves is quite interesting. There are a lot of lobsters, and solitary fish that are bigger than average. I liked these a lot – you shine your torch on them and they look at you as if they’re saying, ‘Hey, come on, leave the cave!’ They seem to treat you as though you are the guest, and you should behave like one. But that’s what I like about diving: you get to meet the animals where they are at home and you’re in the wrong place. Most of the time, for example when you visit a zoo, it’s the other way round.

People say that compared to the Red Sea, Mediterranean diving is poor. But it’s like asking where it’s best to go hiking – in the Alps, the desert, the bush or the Scottish Highlands? You can’t really say that one is better than another – each type has its own fascination. Also, in the Red Sea it’s a bit like looking at a garden crammed with coloured flowers; in the Med, it’s more like coming across a single rose, and really examining it.

I really like Sardinia and although I’ve only dived it once, I’ve been back for surfing a few times and will definitely dive it again.


Ciao bella - Karen Gould

Karen Gould, 39, is a physics teacher and lives in Tunstall, near Woodbridge in Suffolk. A BSAC sports diver, she learned to dive ten years ago. Her husband, Ken, is also a keen diver; they have two children, Sonia, eight, and Jason, five. She spent a week diving in Sardinia in 1999 with three friends from Sunstar Sub Aqua, her local BSAC branch.

Because I have two children and my husband is a diver as well, I don’t dive very often, so I go for quality rather than quantity: I’ve dived in Cyprus, the island of Madeira and the Red Sea, as well as the south and east coasts of England. We booked the trip to Sardinia quite late on and had to work round the school holidays, so we went in the May half-term break. The main advantages of Sardinia were that it was only two hours’ flight away, it was cheap and the visibility was good. The company [which no longer exists] that organized the holiday booked us a self-catering apartment in Cannigione in the north of the island, as well as two dives a day. One day it was too windy to go out and on another we only did one dive and then joined in a local festival that was on. It seemed compulsory to go along and drink lots of red wine and eat barbecued, almost-raw meat!

There wasn’t a huge amount of life, but the visibility was 15–20m, and there was a great deal of ‘little’ life as well as octopus and a lot of colourful sponges. We did three wreck dives, the best of which was the Angelica [a freighter that sank in 1982], which is a classic wreck. You can go inside the bridge and do your Titanic bit off the bow. The marine park, Lavezzi, near the island of Maddalena, was also good. The first time we tried to go there we had to turn back as the sea was thought to be too rough, but it looked okay to us – we’re used to UK diving! When we got there, we were given frankfurters to feed the giant groupers, but as soon as they had eaten them they went away.

The water temperature was about 16°C at the end of May, so I was fine in my semi-dry, but it’s close-fitting and a struggle to get into and out of, and I was jealous of two guys from Northern Ireland who had drysuits.


O sole mio - Philip Barr

Philip Barr, 40, works in the human resources department at Barclaycard and lives in Guildford, Surrey. He first dived in Jamaica ten years ago, when he took a resort course on his honeymoon. His second diving experience was in May 2001 when he qualified as a diver in Sardinia. He stayed in Club Hotel Capo Testa, a Mark Warner resort at the northernmost tip of the island, with his sons Adam, eight, and Liam, six.

When my wife heard she was doing jury service I decided to take the boys away on holiday over the late May bank holiday weekend. A while back, I’d heard a friend speak highly of Mark Warner, so I booked with the company at fairly short notice. The only hotel available was in Sardinia but I was lucky, as it is a really beautiful island.

While I was diving, the boys were taken care of at the kids’ club, and Adam even did a pool-diving course. As we were there at the start of the holiday season, I was the only diver on the course, so I had one-to-one attention. Although I’d done a little diving in Jamaica, it had been ten years ago, so I was pretty much a first-time diver. It was all very interesting and I found the coral fascinating. The water was generally clear, although occasionally a bit cloudy. The weather was fantastic, and seeing the coastline from the boat was great.

What really made the holiday was the quality and friendliness of the staff, not only those in the hotel and dive centre, but also the people doing the childcare. They were of student age, and were excellent. The other guests were very friendly – it’s a communal atmosphere and there were plenty of people to talk to.


La dolce vita - Bob Sendley

Bob Sendley, 50, a self-employed builder, lives in East Cowes on the Isle of Wight with his partner Judy, 42, a chartered surveyor. They are both BSAC sports divers and visited Sardinia with Sardinia Scuba Tours in May 2001 and their friend Cilla. They stayed in Cala Di Falco, a resort near Cannigione on the northeast coast.

Judy’s quite an experienced diver and has dived in Fiji and Australia but, apart from the ocean diver course, I’ve only done a bit of diving in Malta, where I did my sports diver course. The set-up at the dive centre used by Sardinia Scuba Tours, Anthias Diving, was great and the Italian guys on the boat were brilliant – they were aware of everything. I can’t recommend the place highly enough, especially for someone newly qualified or who has been away from diving for a while.

They had a beautiful 7.5m RIB, which was comfortable, and the water was very clear, definitely better than around Malta. We saw all the usual Mediterranean creatures such as octopus and cuttlefish, and on one trip we went to the Lavezzi Islands [in the Strait of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia]. It’s a marine reserve where you can see giant groupers, which was fantastic. One day we were going to dive a wreck, but the guys on the boat realized that the winds weren’t right and that it would have been an uncomfortable situation. Yet rather than just aborting the dive, they found another site.

It was about a five-minute walk from our apartment to the marina and each day when we got to the boat there were four people loading everything up – we didn’t have to carry anything. Between dives it just took a few minutes to change tanks. Everything was very smooth and professionally run. We’d taken 4mm shorties, which definitely weren’t going to be warm enough, so we bought 6mm two-pieces which were fine, although we did get a bit chilly below 25m.

The diving was over by 2pm each day, but there was plenty to do afterwards – there was a nice beach, the resort had a pool, or you could go cycling. One day we went to one of the small islands between Sardinia and Corsica – Maddalena – and saw a herd of wild pigs with piglets in the forest: it was brilliant.

We had a self-catering apartment, which was very nice, with a view down to the sea. We ate out quite a bit, as it was inexpensive to have a few beers and a meal.
Maybe the hardened, experienced diver would say, ‘It’s not as good as the Red Sea.’ But, then again, one of the guys we dived with, a university lecturer who was a very experienced diver, said it was really good.