Day 2: Pele/Wayil

The first dive was at Four Kings. It’s four pinnacles that step down in depth, with current, a lot of fish, and soft corals. Overall a really nice site, probably one of the best sites of the trip.

For some reason, the plan at the end of the dive involved swimming back against the current, which felt unnecessary.  At some point during the dive, I decided that this was a ridiculous plan and I was not actually going to plan to get all the way back to the start point.  We have SMBs and chase boats for a reason, right?  We got back to the third pinnacle and were hanging out there, when Clinton thumbed it on gas.  I shot a bag and he and I went up while Rob and our DM (Gabriel) stayed on the bottom.  After this dive, Rob and Clinton decided to upgrade to Aluminum 100s (I stuck with my 80).

The second dive was at a site called Toblerone. The light was poor and the viz was mediocre. We followed a wall/slope that kind of went around in a big U shape, and then there is a large underpass on top. There were a lot of fusiliers up on top, and a decent amount of soft corals inside the underpass. We saw a blue dragon nudi and a wobbegong in the shallow area on top.  I think this was the first time I’ve seen a wobbegong, definitely the first time of this trip.  Woohoo!

The third dive was at Gorgonian Channel. We were dropped much further upcurrent than expected and spent a good part of the dive trying to figure out where the soft corals were.  There was a lot of current in the channel where we first dropped, and there were *some* patches of soft corals here and there.  Rob kept stopping to shoot those, and I had to swim upcurrent to stay with him.  We eventually found some super nice super lush areas of soft corals about 25 minutes in.  Doh.  We were supposed to just drift to those and start the dive there.

So the soft corals themselves were very very nice, but we didn’t get to spend as much time there as we should have :(

The night dive was at Wayil Wall.  It was a nice relaxing dive on the wall.  We saw an octopus, eel, lobster, pygmy seahorse, and a conger eel.  The pygmy was definitely the highlight of the dive.