Dubrovnik Afternoon

7/14 afternoon in Dubrovnik

I’ll admit, when I first walked down the gangway out of the ship to go snorkeling, I was wishing that I could be sleeping or wasting time on the internet at the café. But now that I’ve been on the trip, I’m so glad I went because it ended up being really fun.

From the very beginning of the trip, I knew most people were having similar second thoughts about snorkeling in our last few hours in Dubrovnik. At the bus just outside the ship, I met a group of other *ahem* tired people who had decided to go out to Revelin the night before, including Kallen Abby and Kaitlin, three of the friends I had gone out with the night before. But this meant we all had similar experience and lots of stories to share, so we entertained ourselves for fifteen minutes or so until the trip leader showed up with the other 2/3 of the SASers going on the trip. Turns out we were actually supposed to meet in the Union, not by the bus, and those 2/3 had not gone to Revelin the night before, so they had actually checked the meeting place instead of assuming it was the bus as usual. Oh well, we made the trip.

We boarded the bus, and literally drove to the end of the port, a 5-10 minute walk the entire ship made every day, and got dropped off by two boats that would take us to the snorkeling headquarters across the bay. This lack of foresight and planning is unfortunately common in the SAS-organized trips. Luckily, most of mine have been pretty good, but several have had hours cut off because of bad communication between the professors designing the trips, the field office booking the trips, and the local tourist companies carrying out the trips. But, when going along with these trips the headache of planning and dealing with snafus in those plans is never your own, so that is still one serious advantage. Also, on SAS trips you get to meet new groups of people since the signups occurred either over summer or at the very beginning of the trip before people broke into friend groups.

Once we arrived at the snorkeling/scuba diving/parasailing/waterskiing (yes it was flat enough to water ski)/tubing/banana boating shop on the other side of the bay, we were divided into two groups. We were in the second, so we lounged on the beach (again, by beach I mean pebbles, rocks and concrete areas) and swam for about an hour and a half while the first group went snorkeling. When they returned, we grabbed out fins, masks and snorkels and the ten of us loaded into the boat along with the captain and three Croatian snorkel guides about our age. All three of them looked like the Croatian version of beach/water sport bums, and one was wearing a water polo speedo (with the H2O polo logo in a polo ball) under his trunks. Also their trunks were brands like Quicksilver and Hurley that only reinforced this similarity. We motored over to what looked like several large, craggy rocks jutting out of the ocean and the captain stopped the boat so we could all jump in, which we did gladly since it was quite warm.

There was surprisingly little sea life. It wasn’t entirely a surprise as I had been told to expect this both by people who had already been snorkeling here and in my marine biology class where we learned that this warmer, saltier part of the Mediterranean, while being beautiful and very clear, did not have as much life as the western Mediterranean and had much less life than, for example, the Pacific off the California coast. The substrate was mainly large boulders covered in a thin layer of green, red or brown algae in some places and looking bare in others. When we were closer to the rocks jutting out of the water, I could see several tide pools or other places where tide pools might form under different circumstances. I didn’t see any hermit crabs or other little creatures in the tide pools here, but when I went to a rocky cove a few days ago I saw several crabs, hermit crabs, and even a few little fish in the tide pools. At this cove I could also clearly see zonation occurring the in intertidal community. Far up on the rocks there were completely bare any dry, probably the places where the ocean didn’t reach even at high tide. In places a little lower, where the ocean probably reached just at high tide, there still wasn’t really anything there. I wondered if this was because of physical limitations: that marine organisms just couldn’t stand being as dry as they would be living in that area, or if it was due to some other interaction between the creatures in the community, like the predator-prey interaction we saw in class between the limpets and algae. Just above the water level, there was some dry algae that looked greenish-brown and was very small. At the water level, the rocks were slippery with brown algae and studded with the occasional small invertebrate, probably limpets, stuck to the rock. In the water there was larger algae and some fish, one of which actually bumped into or tried (unsuccessfully) to take a bite of out my leg. Or maybe I just accidentally walked into its home as some small fish can be incredibly territorial (and audacious). I didn’t see any sea urchins in this cove, but I didn’t have goggles or a mask with me at the time so it was more difficult to see what all was living on the bottom after a certain point, although overall the water in Croatia was amazingly clear and kept making me and everyone I swam with think it was much shallower than it really was.

But back to the snorkeling trip. To really see any life, I had to dive down six feet or so to get closer to the rocks at the bottom. This of course made me wish I were scuba diving, but hopefully I will get a chance to do that at a future port. What made me wish even more that I were diving was one of the Croatian snorkel guides telling me that there was a small shipwreck just to the left of where we were snorkeling, but that it was probably too deep for us to be able to see from the surface. But once I dove down closer to the rocks in my snorkel gear, I could see some fish and other life between the rocks. I saw several of the fish I saw in the Medes that looked like a small kelp bass, with the mottled brown and tan coloring. I’m not sure if these were the same species or not, but it seems possible, and they were behaving similarly: just floating stationary near the bottom. Also, I saw fish that were similar to the ones in the Medes with little black spots on their tails, but they looked smaller and narrower here. I also saw small schools of dark grey fish a couple inches long. Whenever I saw schools I would try to swim near them (or through them) because it’s cool to be surrounded by fish, but they always swam away the second I got close. I’m sure that is because they are so well adapted to school together and stay away from big fish (or curious snorkelers).

The first really cool thing I saw was a torpedo left from WWII. It was wedged between two boulders in about ten feet of water, and was covered in a light layer of mossy looking algae. It didn’t seem to me like much life had made the torpedo its home (which was surprising since that is what usually happens to wrecks and anything else that sinks into the sea), but that may have been because I couldn’t stay down there and look at it very long. Also, it was reflective of the amount of sea life in the surrounding area, and more generally in the Adriatic. We continued to snorkel close to the jutting rocks, and I continued to dive down to try and spot something interesting. I saw several smallish black sea urchins, which I avoided. I heard that several people came to the medical center on the ship to get sea urchin spines removed during their time in Croatia, and I’m glad I wasn’t one of them. I also saw a fish about the same size (maybe six inches) and shape as the kelp bass-like fish, but that had black and white vertical and slightly wavy stripes, a little like a treefish (but without the giant red lips). 

By far my favorite creature of the day was an octopus. I’m so lucky that I saw it, I think only me and one or two other people saw it before it disappeared too deep into its crevice between the rocks. I heard one of the guides say octopus, so I booked it over to him. We dove down ten feet or so and he pointed into the crevice. Two fish (the treefish-like ones) were floating in front of the hole looking at the octopus, which I thought was odd. I’m pretty sure they weren’t actually just sitting there looking at it like I was (maybe waiting for it to check out some leftover mollusk parts), but it was nice to not be the only spectator. The octopus was a pale purplish pinkish tanish color that blended in with the rocks nearby. I didn’t see it change color while I was there, and when I swam down the second time it was too deep in the hole to see. It was on the small side, with the body about the size of two fists stacked on top of one another and then the tentacles stretching around it. I couldn’t see the tentacles fully, so I’m not sure how long they were. I could see the octopus filtering water though its body, which looked very cool and a little creepy. I’m not sure what it was doing at the time, maybe looking for tasty mollusks, but it looked like it was just sitting near the edge of its den, looking at the two treefish-like fish outside as they stared back. When we came to the surface, the guide who had spotted the octopus called it a “she”, so I asked if it was a girl octopus, and he said that yes, it was a female. I asked how he knew, and he just laughed and told me it was because she didn’t say anything, so I guess that was a joke and not actually the sex of the octopus.

After this, we went over to the underwater cave. I saw cave, but what it was really more like a small, underwater rock tunnel leading into pool of ocean surrounded by the craggy rocks jutting five to fifteen feet into the sky. The pool itself was open on top, so the “cave” was really the underwater tunnel. The guides told us we had to be able to dive down about two meters and hold our breath for about fifteen seconds, which is fine for ocean people used to diving under waves, but most of the people on the trip were not ocean people and couldn’t make it. I went through the tunnel first with the guide, and it was a little longer than I expected but very manageable. I love underwater caves, so I was really wishing at this point (again) that I were scuba diving. At first that cave was pretty dark, but after a few stroked a bright turquoise circle opened up from where the sunlight was streaming in through the pool within the rocks. The pool inside the rocks was very cool. It was literally as calm as a swimming pool despite the small swell around the rocks in the crashing of waves and surge action on the other side of the rocks. The pool was also quite deep, with the rocks coming almost vertically out of the water and leaving the pool (about the size of a large backyard swimming pool) in the middle. There were a few paths in the rocks where people could climb from the ocean outside into the pool (but my way was definitely cooler). The three guides climbed up to the top of the rocks, and I followed since following them in the past had lead to both seeing the octopus and swimming through the cool underwater tunnel At the top they asked me if I was going to jump off into the pool, and I said of course, so I was the first one to jump in. Many SASers went cliff diving in Croatia, and I did not so this mini-jump of about fifteen feet or so held me over. After I jumped in, all three of the guides had to show me up by swam diving off the rocks into the pool, which was just unfair. After that, some other people also jumped off the rocks, some needing much more encouragement to actually take the plunge than others (again, not all ocean or heights people). When I was waiting to jump a second time, a bunch of scuba divers entered the pool, so we all had to wait another five minutes or so for them to clear out before we could keep jumping. There was another, longer underwater tunnel leading out the other side of the pool that the scuba divers exited through. I asked one of the guides about this, but he said that it was too long to swim through, which was disappointing.

After we had played around enough, the group climbed over the rocks and I and a few other people swam back through the underwater tunnel to get back to the ocean. Once there, the boat we had come in was outside waiting for us and the captain sounded his alarm and began yelling at our guides in Croatian. Apparently they had taken a little too much time letting us have fun in the pool, because we were now late. They didn’t seem to mind though, and I had the feeling that they were used to this happening, but they did shepherd us quickly back to the boat. From there we went back to the shop to pick up our clothes, and then back to the port where we took the three minute bus ride down the port to our ship (totally worth it to get a bus, SAS field office) and got back on the ship just in time for a quick shower before dinner.

At 7pm we had another life boat drill, the second of the trip because regulations require them to be repeated each month, so we’ve now been on the ship a month, which I find very hard to believe. The trip is just zooming by…we already have four ports under our belt with another four to go.






More love from Dubrovnik,
Ginny