The first dive was back at the jetty. There were more turtles, although not as many large ones as the previous day. But I think Rob managed to get some good turtle-in-blue-water shots of one of the not-huge turtles. He also managed a great shot of the giant sweetlips under the jetty.
There were some fairly strange divers around the site, which made things a bit more chaotic than necessary. But this did provide for some entertainment. At some point late in the dive when we were back up near the jetty, we saw a diver swim by, carrying his BC and tank under him. Like he had his entire rig but instead of wearing it, he had his arms wrapped around it. Then we saw a second diver doing this! I guess it’s a trend. I’m sure all of the sidemount rebreather divers in Florida will be sporting this new configuration any day now.
The second dive was at Manta Way. We saw one or two passes by a manta at a cleaning station, and then things were quiet for a while. After that, we did a long, fairly fast swim to another area, which was a bit tiring, and did see another manta, although it didn’t stick around very long.
There was also a good wobbegong sighting nearby, and we got to see it swim briefly. This might have been the highlight of the dive.
Both the third dive and the night dive were at Yellow Coconut, which is a muck site, and it was very good. I was very excited to do a muck dive, since we had been talking about the fact that we’d kind of seen all kinds of different sites on this trip *except* for a muck dive. And I love muck diving.
Between the two dives, we saw a blue-ring octopus, several other small octopuses, a red cuttlefish, bobtail squids, costasiella slugs – that’s “shawn the sheep” (and lots of those little green leaves without the slugs), and a number of other small slugs, along with a lot of small crabs and shrimp.
Clinton flooded a strobe on the night dive and had to end the dive early. Luckily it was just a little bit of water in the strobe and it was recoverable. But good that he noticed it right at the beginning and aborted the dive.
P.S. This post has two of my favorite photos from the trip. I'll let you guess which ones they are...
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