We met up a little early since we had to setup our gear in
the morning. We had both forgotten to
bring our STAs, but since all of the DMs dive with backplates and wings, we
were told on arrival that they could hook us up with STAs (phew). So we had to scavenge from the DM gear to
find ones that would work for us, and figure out how to rig weights and
stuff. I ended up just using a small
weight belt, after a couple of sketchy attempts to mount weights on the cam
bands (my STA has weight pockets). Once
that was taken care of, they loaded our gear onto the boat, and we headed for
one of the “far away” local sites (a 12 minute boat ride), called Coral
Cove. This site is around the eastern
point of the island, then southwest from that point. It was crazy flat when we got to the
site. Rob asked the crew if it was always
this calm. They laughed and said
no.
We were diving with Norm, and it was to be a 70 foot max
depth dive. The site slopes down gently
from about 20 feet to > 70 feet (we didn’t quite stick to the 70 foot max
depth, but I don’t think we got much past 80).
Rob was shooting macro, so we were looking for critters. We saw a few different kinds of nudibranchs,
one Pygmy seahorse, two frogfish, and a (black) ribbon eel. Plus lots of cute little fishies and
crustaceans. One cool thing that Norm
pointed out was an electric clam. I did
not even know that such a creature existed!
It was really cool to watch it “arc”.
The second frogfish that Norm found was multi-colored, with an
interesting pattern on it.
Unfortunately, Norm found it after Rob had already thumbed the
dive. We had worked our way up the slope
by this point, so I asked Rob if he really didn’t have the gas for some
pictures, and sadly he did not. There
was a decent amount of current on this site, and we were at some points
swimming against the current (I think because Norm wanted to find the pygmy
seahorse for us). It was a bit of work
:)
The second dive was at West Escarceo, which is closer; it is
not quite to the point to the east. We
joined another boat with some chaps from the UK for the rest of the day. This was another site that was reefy on a
slope. This dive was with Cris, who was
good at pointing out little critters.
After lunch, we went back to basically one site over, to a site called
“Wreck Point” with Thax. Our nudi-finding
skills improved with each dive, so we saw more of the ones we’d seen before
plus some new guys.
There was a dusk dive to look for mandarin fish, so we
initially thought we wouldn’t have time for the second afternoon dive, but Rob
didn’t comprehend this concept, and talked them into taking us for a quick dive
just out from of the resort. Like a one
minute boat ride. We were joined by
another diver who had just received his delayed gear, so this was his first
dive of the trip. This site was pretty
much sand with little patches of reef, which had plenty of neat critters. All in all, across the day dives, in addition
to the nudibranchs, the other critters that I liked the best were the orangutan
crabs (which are SO cute). And that
electric clam was really awesome.
The mandarin fish dive was similarly close to the
resort. The plan was to spend 20 or so
minutes in the rubble area with the mandarinfish and then swim off for a night
dive. We were told that the fishies
wouldn’t like white lights, so a couple people had red lights to use
instead. We were briefed to drop down
around this rubble area and form a circle, and kneel on the sand and wait for
the fishies to come out. I’m not exactly
a fan of kneeling on the sand (not so much for philosophical reason but because it just isn't comfortable in my opinion), but hovering in a circle, when there is current,
is a bit of a pain. Rob found the
perfect spot in the circle so he was just swimming a little bit into the
current. And left me to get swirled
around in the current :P At first I was
getting pretty bored because I would just occasionally get a glimpse of one or
two of the fish, and I could barely make them out. I guess my eyes eventually adjusted, because
eventually I was able to see them really clearly and I could pick out pairs of
them all over the place! So then it got
fun. We ended up spending about 45
minutes with the mandarinfish, and then swam around a bit to look for other
critters. The memorable critters that we
saw were a white cuttlefish (my first ever, not a flamboyant though) and a really
cool (maybe a little creepy-looking) flatfish.
Somewhere during the course of the day, I managed to destroy
yet another E/O cord on my light. I hate
E/O cords. 
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