Nudi Gal: Eat Sleep Dive

This flight was uneventful, about an hour and I found out that we’ll be staying another day and my camera and housing should come tomorrow. Woo Hoo!

In the meantime, I’ve been shooting with my Sony Cybershot. They pictures are just not as high quality, but I still took pictures to prove what I’ve seen.

This trip is so great because nobody is making fun of me for loving nudibranchs. They all love finding and indentifying them. I am the novice in the crowd! The “bible” for identification we are using is “Indo-Pacific Nudibranchs and Sea Slugs – A field guide to the World’s most diverse fauna" by Terrence M. Gosliner, David W. Behrens, and Angel Valdes.

Here’s how the dive schedule goes each day:

Continental Breakfast

7:30am Dive 1

Second Breakfast (my favorite is Mie Goreng – noodles with a fried egg on top)

11:00am Dive 2

Lunch

3:00pm Dive 3

Snack

6:30pm Dive 4 (night dive)

Dinner

And in between each dive, we’re all downloading pictures, categorizing them and collectively working on identifying unknown nudis.

Each dive lasts about 90 minutes and you are only restricted by your air remaining and you dive computer. It’s pretty awesome.

I found out that Christianne still logs each and every one of her dives. By hand. She even keeps track of her total number of cumulative hours spent underwater. She has had special dive log pages that she designed. And you know what? She only has barely over 3,000 dives. I really admire people who do that because I meet so many people who just stay that they have been diving forever and they have tens of thousands of dives. Too many to log. I call bull shit!!! There is no way.

Three of my table mates had nudibranch shirts on at the dinner table where they had picked several of their photos and had t-shirts specially made. The food is delicious here. I always come into these trips so excited that I’ll be really physical for a week and get in shape and then I realize that I will be eating so much because the food is so delicious.

I could barely keep my eyes open at the end of the night. I was sooooo tired.

But let’s get down to business, here is what I found today:

1 - Ceratosoma tenue

Check it out, there's an imperial shrimp on it!

2 - Tambja morosa

After the night dive, I noticed for the first time that the Tambja has a cool thing around its mouth that looks like another set of gills. I need to get in closer and take a better shot but it did show up in one of my pictures. Graham isn’t sure exactly why they have them… and not all Tambja have them,

3 - Nembrotha chamberlaini