Thursday, January 1, 2015

Whale Shark Whiff

I woke up at 3am again today.  I didn’t fight it… I just got up and started working on some stuff.  Today we skip at least one dive to do find whale sharks.  Not my favorite thing to do, but for many divers who have never seen a whale shark before, this is the coolest thing ever.  I’m just glad we have other things on the itinerary for today as well.

As it turned out, no whale shark for us.

Jim hadn’t ever seen a whale shark and after the second dive he came up saying that he saw one but nobody else did.  We asked him for proof and he didn’t have anything on his camera, so we teased him mercilessly.  Poor Dave has been here to Maldives four times and still hasn’t seen a whale shark.  I pointed him toward Atlantis Azores when they dive Southern Leyte.  He said he’s going to check that out.

Speaking of Dave, we were chatting on the dhoni ride back yesterday and he grew up in NJ.  Mount Holly, NJ.  Where I spent some time as well.  I went to 2nd – 4th grade there.  He’s a bit younger than me, so we wouldn’t have crossed paths.  The sad thing is that I couldn’t remember the name of the grade school I went to.

My favorite dive of the day was the manta dive.  Although a couple of mantas showed up, I was fascinated by taking a couple of nudibranch pictures.  I need to stay down and shoot so many nudi photos whenever I find one here.  

Nudi # 12 - Pteraeolidia ianthina




Nudi #13 - Thuridilla splendens


Divemaster Mif brought this little guy over to me on a rock.  It was so hard to find him in the frame of the camera but when I got him, I took so many pictures.  I played around with the F-stop and I love how just the rhinophores here are in focus, the rest of his body isn’t due to the small depth of field.  Every time I adjusted a setting on my camera, I’d have to search for the nudi to be in the shot again.  It was exhausting.  Oh, and a turtle sorta came down right on me and got in the way… and then once the manta showed up, everyone was tapping me on the shoulder to see it.  To show everyone I saw it, I took a few seconds of a Go Pro video and then went back to what I was doing.  I used to lead the manta night dive in Kona every Thursday night.  They are beautiful, but I’ve had my fill.

A thuridilla is not actually a proper nudibranch, but if Graham includes these in his nudi counts, I’m going to include them in mine.

The boat crew forgot to put my camera on the dhoni for the night dive.  It was a mistake.  Just a little mistake.  But I was so angry.  I was in disbelief.  Many boats leave it up to the diver to bring their camera to the skiff, but here they make a big deal out of us being on vacation and don’t worry, they will bring the cameras.  I was debating being a big baby and not going on the dive at all because I was so angry.  But once upon a time, I promised myself that photography would never become my only reason to dive.  So I jumped in.  At least I still had a dive light and my Go Pro.

We had dinner on this beach of a resort where other liveaboard boats did the same thing.  It was a perfect beach and shoreline and someone had dug holes in the sand and put candles in them.  The crew worked really hard to bring all this food over there and cooked a BBQ.  They even brought real plates and drinks and everything.  There were no bugs and the sky was beautiful.  It would have made for an amazing romantic dinner.  The conversation was a little bizarre but overall not bad for a liveaboard group.

No comments:

Post a Comment