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August 6, 2010

Ses Bledas, west of Ibiza. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

BY: Silvia García

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© OCEANA / Carlos Minguell

 

What can we do? If the report is bad, it’s bad, and we can only approach land. The west of Ibiza seems like a good spot because it’s sheltered by the strong easterly and it is one of the areas where we have planned some dives. So we set our course to West early with more than 6 hours of sailing ahead of us.

 

On the way to the work area, we saw a couple of trawling boats in the south and west areas of Formentera, where we did have a map of the seabed types. We were sure that we would find vast areas red-colored of rhodoliths. We reached the island of Bleda Plana for the first dive of scuba divers. The aim was to document these islands’ seabeds as they have interesting gorgonian walls. When they came out, we approached the shore to take garbage bags and containers onto land. We documented a trawler right in the middle of discarding, the common art of throwing overboard the entire day’s catch that they cannot or are not interested in selling later. Later we submerged the ROV in an area that was nearly 100 m deep, and we obtained precious images of an immense field of rhodoliths where the sponges have freely developed. We encountered a multitude of different species that make this seabed especially colorful.