Event period: from 29 June to 1 July 2016

  Spending my free time after work, eating canned food and the eternal saviours of student diets that are rice and pasta, I have made some progress in my peculiar underwater excavation. The key is to take advantage of the low tides so that the surface and the bottom are as close as possible and so I don’t have to travel so far up and down. I’ve also had to weigh myself down a bit with a weight belt or I wouldn’t move from the surface even if it would kill me. It’s hard to believe, but wetsuits really do improve your buoyancy.

  The tools are curious, here there is no trowel or paddle or bucket, all the sediment is lifted practically on its own with a diving knife. I’m beginning to understand why it’s necessary to have a suction hose for this type of work: you need something to get rid of everything that remains in suspension. I don’t have that, of course, I’ve already spent enough for the moment without having to pay more. The good thing about all this effort is that I have been able to excavate at a high speed and I have ended up finding very soon, finally, a dark, compact and sticky sediment that seems to correspond to a peat bog.

  So far, however, nothing much has come out. All there is are remains of nets, wood, plastics, fishing traps... It sounds incredible that all this rubbish can still reach such a depth, but then you consider how long we’ve been throwing crap into the sea and it doesn’t seem enough.

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  Anyway, there has been little more news in that respect. However, I did get quite a scare when I found myself in front of the lifeguard boat on one of the ascents. They had seen me diving from the lifeguard station and gave me a good scolding for not putting up a buoy to signal that I was swimming in the area. Apparently, it is compulsory to put one up, otherwise there is a chance that boats, in this case speedboats or jet skis, will pass over you and make mincemeat out of you with their propellers.

  I thanked them and started swimming towards the shore, not wanting them to get stuck I thanked them and started swimming towards the shore, not wanting them to stick with my face or give me any more trouble, but then one of them blurted out the damned question: “Why are you diving on the sandy beach?”. At that moment (I tell you as I felt it), I was lucky to have a wetsuit floating for me, because I was completely paralysed. Fortunately, my brain worked at full speed and came out with the lie that I was a biology student and that I was looking and observing a kind of worm that normally buries itself in the sandy bottoms near beaches.

  I don’t know if it stuck or not, but the truth is they didn’t tell me anything else apart from that I shouldn’t dive again until I had a buoy weighted to the bottom or tied to my waist to mark the area where I was going to be, that it was the best thing for my safety and that if anything happened to me, thanks to that visual signal, they could come to my aid quickly... The usual things you would say, in short. So, for now, I’m going to listen to them, and, with a bit of luck and good behaviour, they won’t bother me again.