Taking advantage of the fact that we are close to Mondragó Cove, the divers are going to film the sea bottom and, more importantly, the caves and rock walls. An unfamiliar yet highly important habitat for the coastal area can be found here, it is a “troittoir” or “ledge,” known in the Balearic Islands as … Read more
At night, the wind picks up and, although we could have kept sailing until we reached our destination, the rough seas would have prevented us from carrying out our work anyway. So, in order to take advantage, we have decided to change our plans a little and do some diving in the south-eastern part of … Read more
After arriving at Palma de Mallorca to load supplies and make some changes in the crew, we being to prepare ourselves to receive the submarine robot (ROV) that we will use during the next few weeks. The day has been quite hectic; it is very difficult to find a slot in Palma these days and … Read more
Off the east coast of Formentera there are areas where we can find a combination of walls full of sponges, rocky zones and sandy areas with Posidonia oceanica. Here we can see bigscale scorpionfish (Scorpaena scrofa), cardinal fish (Apogon imberbis), peacock wrasse (Symphodus tinca) and red mullet (Mullus barbatus). There is also a wide range … Read more
The day starts off a little cloudy, but the sea is fairly calm. We head towards the south-west of Ibiza to document some coralligenous and rocky sea beds in this area. At Es Vedra we want to take a look at the state of the red gorgonians (Paramuricea clavata). On approaching the area, we admire … Read more
A little bit of everything today: marine meadow, Cystoseira sp. forests, rocky walls and caves. There is also a ‘fish cleaning station’ in this area. Instead of yesterday’s shrimps, the species in charge of the task today is the tort (Symphodus melanocercus), and its customers are mainly peacock wrasse (Symphodus tinca) and damselfish (Chromis chromis), … Read more
The condition of the sea continues to be perfect for our work. In the morning we had arranged to meet the people from the Marine Reserve, who are helping us to locate dive zones. We will be starting with a sandy sea bed with a few thickets of Posidonia oceanica where a metal structure has … Read more
Today is the start of the final part of this year’s expedition. We’re going to be taking samples from the sea beds around the Balearic Islands using divers, a robot submarine and dredging to classify the different biological communities in the area. During the first few days we’ll be diving between Ibiza and Formentera, and … Read more
This morning, Juan Cuetos and I crossed into Morocco through the Melilla border in order to inspect the Nador fishing port in search of drift netters. The “entrance to Europe” has a unique smell. A huge fence separates two worlds, Africa and Europe. We make our way through the noisy crowd that moves in all … Read more
And at last that is how the Ranger’s port engine roared once again, with a little piece of the Toftevaag, the Alnitak project ship; yes, you read correctly, one of our clutch discs was damaged and we were desperately trying to locate a machinist who could make one for us or a workshop that could … Read more
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