Lanzarote 2007

This year saw a slightly later Dive Trip to warmer climates, due to some faffing around amongst those who wanted to go but couldnt decide when, but to our benefit I hasten to add. Moving our traditional dive week from September to November benefitted us heftily in our pockets.

An original quote was obtained from a "middle man" type activity organiser which was ridiculously high and so I took to surfing the internet to seek out some keener prices for our divers.

Eventually I came across a company called Freedomdirect.Co.Uk who were offering astonishingly good deals on their website, so good in fact, that I didnt actually believe they were correct, so I rang them just to check. I was astounded by their high level of customer service - the phone was answered on the second ring and Wendy in Customer Sales was incredibly helpful. She arranged for everyone to pay on their own credit cards and agreed that the prices were indeed correct, so we hastily booked.

We stayed at the Santa Rosa apartments in Costa Teguise, which is about a 15 minute walk from the centre, so it is in a very quiet location (actually one review recommended it for the over 40's so that was definitely the place for us) which is just what you need after a hard days diving ! The centre has plenty of excellent dining facilities with everything from Tapas, Pizza, Mexican to fabulous steak houses.

Our flight was a chartered flight with Air Malta and again outstanding service from this airline. Following a quick telephone call and an email to pre-flight services, an extra 15kg of baggage was granted for every diver in the party on both outbound and inbound flights without any hassle at all... which was good considering the weight of my bag...oops.

The whole trip was excellent, early morning flights both ways, local airport, great accommodation and a friendly and helpful dive school - Calipso Diving in Costa Teguise. Debs and Andy picked us up each morning at the hotel and dropped us back again in the evening.

The diving was definitely worth doing. Its mainly quite deep diving, generally anything from 26m to 36m and some of quite challenging, so its not for the faint hearted and you certainly need to have good buoyancy control, deep diver experience and several sea dives under your belt before attempting them. Most of it is shore entry diving with the odd boat dive thrown in for good measure - and the boat journeys take about 5 - 10 mins max.

Sea life was good with a mixture of eagle rays, electric rays, moray eels, tiger morays, angel sharks and huge groupers.

In fact it was so good, we are all agreed that we will definitely be returning next year to do it all over again.

See our Photo Gallery pagefor dive trip photos.