Rob decided to shoot wide angle today and asked that we go to some wide angle sites, given how nice the one we went to yesterday was. We were a bit delayed to leave due to waiting for someone from the coast guard to come and clear us to leave. I’m not sure what the deal is, but for some reason, this was required every morning. There was no clear explanation for this except that it was something new that must be done everyday. So some dude in military fatigues showed up, looked at some papers and the boats and then we could go. Once that was finally done, we also went to a very far away site, the furthest we’d been yet, so it was a late start once we got in the water.
There was some explanation about current and depending on the current, we’d go here or there, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but basically we dropped into an area with what I’d describe as a bunch of coral pinnaclets, and a drop off, and some current that made it not that desirable to go to some areas of the site. There were zillions of anthias in the water clustered around various coral heads, plus lots of other tropical fish. Lots of blue triggerfish. The occasional trumpetfish. And I saw one barracuda swoop through and harass the other fish. Not a lot happened on the dive, since I was basically just drifting around in the aquarium. Initially tried to pose for some pics,but the anthias seemed super shy, which was frustrating Rob, so I figured the more bubbles, the shyer they’d be, so I wandered off.
I did make one good find on the dive. Very good, I think. I was drifting along as previously described and I saw a sea snake slithering over the top of a coral ridge! It was black and white striped. I of course thought this was super exciting. Rob was not too far, but just out of light sight along range, staring through his camera. So I swam a little towards him, turned my light up to high power, and vigorously signaled him. It was the “either I’m dying or there’s a GPO” signal. And he gave me a “hold” sign without even looking over at me. Eye roll, eye roll, eye roll. By the time he came over and I swam him back to the spot… no sea snake. I had a fit and yelled at Rob. Then I managed to convey what he had missed. Luckily a couple minutes later I found it a couple coral heads away. So we watched and followed it for a while.
We moved over to another pretty close site and anchored there for our surface interval. There was a catastrophic failure of the hot water thermos, so we had to settle for cold water and oreos to snack on. It was super flat and super nice out today.
When we first dropped in on this site, I found it pretty unimpressive. It did not seems to have nearly as many fish as the previous site. There was a slope with corals, but it just wasn’t nearly as pretty. Before we got moving, Joemar got our attention to show us a sea snake! We watched it for a while, and it hung out for pictures. Then it headed to the surface. We continued on to a drop off, which was actually pretty nice. I guess the spot we dropped on just wasn’t the best. There were some big gorgonian things hanging on the side that were worth posing next to. But the best finds of the dive were frogfish. Big frogfish. There were four that we found, and boy were they big. Two of them actually swam around a bit for us which was kind of awkward. I think it’s about what I’d look like trying to swim in my gear without my fins on.
There was also a neat overhang on the wall, kind of a little cave, which was super colorful inside and had quite a few fish in there, including some kinds of fish that I didn’t see outside. After that, we came up the wall and Rob managed to find a coral head with a bunch of anthias that seemed not that skittish. He sent me up to 10 feet to pose as a silhouette for a long while. By then it was pretty much time to call the dive. Joemar put a bag up and we waited for the boat to come and pick us up.
For our afternoon dive, we went to a spot just down from the hotel to the right. It had patches of coral/rubble on the sand. The highlight of the dive was a flamboyant cuttlefish! Just before the dive, as we were walking to the boat, Rob was talking about other critters to “request” and I mentioned flamboyant cuttlefish. I didn’t even put in my request and I got one! Aside from that, Joemar found plenty of nudis, including a lot of the purple aeolids with peach rhinophores. There were so many of those that even I found a few. Joemar also found some of the nudibranchs that look like flesh colored soft corals… which I’ve been looking for every time I see a small patch of the soft coral that could instead be a slug. Oh and last but not least, there was a HUGE sea snake. I guess maybe they aren’t so uncommon after all!
For the night dive we went to twin rocks, where we did our first dive of the trip. It wasn’t super productive but there were some good finds… a mantis shrimp with eggs, which was the first of the trip. Five cuttlefish, ranging from really small to pretty average sized. Of course the really small one was the first one that we found. They were all quite skittish and not well behaved photo subjects :(. And right before the end of the dive, Joemar pointed out a big crab wearing clothing. I’m not sure what it was that he had on its back, it was probably a piece of a palm fronds or something, but it was a sheet of something fibrous that kind of looked like a burlap sack. I’m not sure if it was stuck to the crab intentionally (like a decorator crab) or not, but I wasn’t going to try to undress the crab.
I had a mudslide before dinner. It was on the specials list, and I wanted something creamy. And I’m a sucker for drink specials. It was no mango colada.
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