Secca Carega (Secca Gonzatti)

The dive

Two names, one reef. The marine protected area registers it as site 8, Secca Gonzatti - Secca Carega, and divers mostly call it Secca Carega, after the rock standing above the water in the shape of a chair. Gonzatti is the other half of the name, for one of the pioneers of Italian diving; the plaque itself is a separate dive, registered by the park as site 9, Targa Gonzatti, a few hundred metres away. Dive centres on the promontory use both names, sometimes together, and the park's own page carries them side by side.

The reef rises from the bottom close in to the shore, its top about 5 m below the surface. The park gives a working range of 4 to 6 m at the shallowest and 30 m at the deepest, and grades the dive medium. Two routes come off the same mooring: the inside, facing the coast, where the rock forms a canyon, and the outside, facing open water, where the face drops vertically. The south slope falls to about 25 m and carries red coral, red gorgonians and clouds of damselfish; the north side runs to around 20 m over scattered boulders with algae and yellow gorgonians. Below that the wall keeps going, and independent accounts put the outer face at 45 m and beyond, which is past the park's published figure and past most recreational plans.

The fish are the reason people come back. Seabream, large groupers and, in some seasons, dentex work the reef, and barracuda are a fixture. Occurrence records collected around this pin are unusually dense for a Mediterranean site and read like a monitored reef rather than a trawl: damselfish, corb, fan mussel, spiny lobster, brown grouper, purple starfish, Mediterranean slipper lobster, conger. Those records almost certainly come from the same protected area that writes the site description, so treat them as one body of work confirming itself rather than two independent sources.

• Reef top about 5 m below the surface, close in to the promontory
• Red coral and red gorgonians on the vertical south slope
• Yellow gorgonians and boulder ground on the shallower north side
• Groupers, seabream and barracuda, with dentex in some seasons

Conditions

A short boat run from Santa Margherita, Camogli or Portofino to a numbered park mooring, then a dive that must stay within a circle around it. The reef top is at about 5 m, so a safety stop happens on the rock rather than in blue water. Expect a medium-grade profile that gets deeper and more vertical as you move to the seaward side, and expect current to be the thing the briefing spends time on.

On current: The two sides of the reef behave differently and the sources disagree on how deep it goes. The marine protected area publishes a maximum of 30 m; Scubaportal describes walls reaching about 45 m on the seaward face. We carry the park's 30 m because it is the figure attached to the authorised site and the conservative one to plan against, and because anything below it is a decompression dive on a wall that keeps falling. Current is the variable that makes or breaks the dive: Scubaportal notes stronger current on parts of the structure, and the predators are reported to show up precisely when it runs.