Palavas-les-Flots, Carnon & Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone · France · Reef
Bobby
A wide scree field at 8-14 m for slow hunting
Area photo: Julien Renoult · CC BY 4.0
A wide field of scree off Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone, running from 14 m at the bottom up to 8 m. There is no single feature to swim to: the site is broad and the dive is spent working the same kind of ground, looking into the gaps between blocks. Sar and rockfish are all over it, and it is a reliable nudibranch site.
Where it is and how deep
43.4647° N, 3.8745° EApproximate position — the dashed circle shows where the site lies; your operator's briefing has the mooring.
The dive
Bobby is scree rather than reef: broken rock spread over a wide area off Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone, going down to 14 m and rising to 8 m. Because the site is so wide there is plenty to excavate and no obvious route, so a dive here works best as a slow sweep in one direction rather than an attempt to cover the whole of it in a single immersion.
Sar and other rockfish are present in numbers over the blocks. The reason to come, though, is the nudibranchs — including the large doris — and the tritons that are regularly found here. That makes it a macro dive: pick a line through the scree, stay close to the rock and look into the gaps rather than swimming over the top of them.
Marine life and season
- Nudibranchs
- Macro critters
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fair | Fair | Fair | Fair | Good | Prime | Prime | Prime | Prime | Good | Fair | Fair |
Season follows Palavas-les-Flots, Carnon & Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone: Clubs dive year-round, but logged visibility sits near 2 m and the sea at 10-12 °C from January to March; one club runs seven days a week in July and August.
Sources
- Bobby, dive site — Scubago/SSI
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