Vertical Underwater Current

Sometimes unpredictable forces of nature can turn a pleasant day of diving with a friend into a scary, even dangerous experience. This blog post is an account of a dive that I did quite a few years ago, a dive that did not go as well as it should have.

It was a beautiful sunny day in early August, and my dive buddy and I were planning an easy dive from a rocky shore in Porkkala in Southern Finland, not too far from where I live. It is a popular dive spot because it is usually an easy site to dive and it is easily accessible.

Salema porgy (sarpa salpa)

Salema porgy is a species of bream that is relatively common in the subtropical area of Eastern Atlantic (coasts of Northern Africa and Spain) and in the Mediterranean. It is also found in the Indian Ocean, in the coastal waters of South Africa and Mozambique. It is a shoaling fish, which means that it swims in large schools to avoid predators. Its size is 20 to 50 centimetres long.

This is a school of salema porgys that I spotted when I was doing some cave diving near Kalithea in Rhodes. A couple of saddled seabreams swimming in the same school also made the right hand corner of the picture.