Liveaboard Love

I love liveaboard diving.  It is so easy.  They feed you really well and all you need to do is charge your batteries and pull on a wetsuit to dive five dives a day.  J

It makes me so happy.

Randy is the captain and the rest of the crew is Filipino.  Randy was the captain on the Tahiti Aggressor when I was a guest on it.  He worked the Aggressors for 5 years and then captained private yachts before landing here.  I have a great picture of him cutting up chum for the shark feeding in Tahiti, I’ll have to dig it up when I get home.

There is crazy group of Canadians who are on one of the skiffs and then there is Tom/Merilee, Rich and I and a couple who live in the Philippines but are from Scotland/Michigan.  We lucked out – it’s a good group.

We did two dives in the morning and then went looking for Whale Sharks on snorkel (not SCUBA).  We had a few spotters helping us out but this time it seemed much more natural and realistic.  When they found one they’d yell for us to get in and we’d jump of the boat and swim like hell in the direction they were pointing… then we’d shoot shoot shoot the best we could.  When they went too deep, we’d climb back in the skiff and do it all over again.  I must say that I got a bit discombobulated a couple of times with my mask slipping off and my snorkel not behaving like a SCUBA regulator.  We had about four sightings and we must have jumped in and out of the boat about 10 times or so.

I found two new nudi species today:

34 - Glossodoris atromarginata

35 - Chromodoris hintantuensis

Since it was a slow nudi day, I thought I’d share a couple of wanna-be nudis:

Pleurobranchs:

These Pleurobranchus forskalii are the size of dinner plates.  There were two of these guys close to one another which probably means they had just mated.  An interesting fact about Pleurobranchs is that their defense mechanism is that when they are touched, that piece of their mantle falls off.  It eventually grows back, but isn’t that wild?

Chelidonuras:

These Chelidonura amoena look like nudis but they aren’t.  They wrap themselves up into all sorts of crazy shapes.  I find them really serene and beautiful.  The common name for them is Pleasant Chelidonura.  I agree.