Tiny bubbles

Ustica, Italy

We had just tied Berkeley East to a mooring ball off Ustica when we heard a troubling noise. Our first reaction was to look for a broken hose within BE’s bilge, then we realized that we had heard this sound before. It was the familiar tune of bubbles, the tiny bubbles of scuba divers under the boat.

The island of Ustica is actually the black-lava top of a submerged volcano. This miniscule island (3.5 square miles) floats alone in the Tyrrhenian Sea, 36 miles north of Sicily. The island’s shore is dotted with grottoes. The surrounding water is kept sparkling by an Atlantic current, and the protection of a marine reserve. The result is a pristine aquatic environment, supposedly full of fish and coral, a scuba diver’s paradise.

We are fortunate to have been scuba diving in some of the most beautiful places in the world. It has been a passion of ours for many years. We would travel just to scuba dive, hike down hills with 30 pounds of gear, dive at night, in freezing water, with sharks, from sailboats, dinghies and even dugout canoes. But since we came to the Mediterranean, we have not found the beautiful scuba diving sites we are so accustomed to. We thought, perhaps, we had finally found the best place to dive in the Med, Ustica.

We watched from Berkeley East as boatloads of divers passed by. When we went into town to explore further, there were divers everywhere, hundreds of them, in full wet suits, in 110-degree heat. It was still August and apparently Ustica was definitely the place to be if you wanted to scuba dive in the Med.

Perhaps we’re too picky, or maybe we’ve just gotten lazy, but looking around at the crowds, we decided to leave the scuba diving on Ustica for another time, and go back to BE for some snorkeling instead. It is the good and the bad of the cruising life; unlike people on a two-week vacation, there is little urgency for us to do anything, as there will always be another day.