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.
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