We started out at an unnamed site along French Bay. It was described as a wall, but I would describe it more as coral pinnacles (on top of a wall, but the wall started so deep that our dives were on the sides of the pinnacles). There were a lot of really big magenta barrel sponges. And a lot of nice nooks to swim through between the pinnacles. The vis wasn't that great here, there was a lot of particulate in the water. But using my 40' == infinity philosophy on visibility, it was plenty of vis for me. :)
In the afternoon, we moved to Blowhole. The site has a cool drop-off into the abyss, with some nice swimthroughs and gulleys along the wall. We saw a lionfish, a huge crab that was perched on the side/edge of the wall in a position that seemed to defy the laws of physics, a porcupine fish, and some cute tiny fish that I haven't quite identified. They kind of looked like tiny scorpion fish (but not the right aspect ratio... longer and not as fat). When I looked in the Humann and DeLoach book, the only thing that looked similar was the red lizardfish, but I'm not sure. I saw at least one of these fish at another site later in the week as well. We saw some more scrawled filefish (which I think are cool), and I saw the fish of the day, the peppermint basslet. Everyday on the dive board, there was a fish of the day listed. It was a good excuse to look something up in the Humann and DeLoach book, and I managed to identify a bunch of fish I might not have otherwise noticed or recognized. No one else seemed to take any interest in the fish of the day, I guess because they are no fun.
I sat out the night dive because I was tired and cold. I wasn't that excited by the night dives on the first two days. When I dive at night in Monterey, I see tons of stuff that we just don't usually see during the day. But on the night dives on this trip, it seemed like it was mostly the same stuff as the day, except the fish were sleeping. I guess the basket star was a cool night dive critter. And a lot of the dive sites were cooler from the wide-angle perspective than the macro stuff, and you just can't appreciate that at night. So I decided that if I was going to sit out one dive of the day, it would be the night dive.
