Anilao 2018: Day 5

For the first dive of the day, we went back to Elmer's Point to look for the pygmy seahorse again.  We saw 5 (well I saw 5; others may have seen more :P) on the darker pink sea fan.  We could not find any of the orange ones though.  Aside from those, which we spent quite some time looking at (and watching Rob take pictures), we saw a huge cuttlefish snoozing in the sand.

After that, we went to the other end of Secret Bay for a muck dive.  Rob and I got almost immediately separated from the rest of the group, because Rob stopped to photograph a sheep nudibranch.  We couldn't find the rest of the group, so eventually we surfaced and followed their bubbles back down.  Doh.  We saw more sheep nudibranchs (Rob's favorite), a ghost pipefish and a sea horse.  It seemed like we spent a lot of time on this dive not finding anything, but I guess overall we had some good finds.

In the afternoon, we went to Bubbles Point.  We went out and back along the wall and saw lots of slugs on it, including several new-to-us dorids.  The wall has tons of encrusting sponges.  This spot was definitely one of my favorite sites in terms of topography.  The wall is nice and it has lots of great stuff living on it.

We did a dusk Mandarin fish dive, which was a pretty long boat ride to get to.  We found a bunch of Mandarin fish, but they weren't in the mood.  We hovered in one spot for about 60 minutes staring at the coral rubble that the fish darted in an out of.  There were a couple of times I really thought they were going to come out, but it never happened.  After we finally gave up on the Mandarin fish, we saw two cuttlefish and two squid.  One of the squid was very cooperative with photos and videos.  So we ended up spending quite a bit of time with him, and that sort of made up for busting out on the Mandarin fish.