It's about diving. And cats.

Me diving

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Day 1: Long Island

The boat moved in the early morning, and we were still moving when we woke up. We ended up at Long Island, at a site called Barracuda Heads, which had a bunch of scattered coral heads, of varying sizes. This site was alright, but not spectacular. On the first dive, we visited several small islands of coral. We saw a leopard flatworm (which I think was my coolest find of the whole trip, I was very excited when I saw it!), and lots of pretty purple gorgonians and sea fans. Rob found a tiny flamingo tongue that was practically stitched into a sea fan. On the second dive, we spent most of the time at one big coral head. We saw some barracuda, a giant crab (like sci-fi movie giant, he was living in this cave, perched on top of a pile of rubble like he was the king of the crab underworld), some tiny blue shrimp living in a corkscrew anemone, and several white margate (big shy gray fish).

During lunch we moved to a site called Joe's Reef. It was spectacular, with tons of fish, small and big, and tons of schools of fish, plus some eels. It was the middle of the day, so it was very bright, and it really looked like a garden, with sea fans and gorgonians moving in the breeze.





We also did a night dive there. We saw two basket stars, one of which was really big. I've never seen basket stars before, I would have completely missed them, but Bob found them. It took me a moment to realize what the first one was. They are so cool! It's really neat to watch them curling and uncurling. Lots of huge crabs (one frighteningly large), some eels, some huge lobster. Also saw some arrow crabs and little orange teardrop crabs. And an orange ball corallimorph, which was probably my second coolest find of the trip. After 5 dives in one day, I was really cold!