Nudi Gal: Strobe Ineptitude

I got up pretty early today. In fact, I forced myself to sleep in until 4:30am at least. Then I made my way down to the dining room to work on photos/list/blog and to watch the sunrise. It is really calm out there. I am super excited for four amazing dives today.

Mike gave a talk this morning about many of the nudis we are seeing here.

He made a reference to a cookie jar… and crap, I won an awesome cookie jar on eBay and never paid for it! It’s this shark cookie jar that plays the Jaws theme when you open it and go to get a cookie. Hilarious!

Gladys and Mike joined our boat for the first dive. She continues to be a food junkie. She brought this awesome candy from China for after the dive that tasted like the middle of a butterfingers bar.

The guy Mike forgot to pick up at the airport, Rob, joined our boat for the second dive. He is stationed in Okinawa and grew up in Ohio. He’s a critter photographer but not really a nudi fanatic.

Dave gave a presentation about geology and why this area is so special to the animal kingdom but since Pirjo and I had already heard it last year, we just worked on our photos and species list and turned it into Jim by 2pm. We were able to write in a few new nudis to Jim’s list.

Mike came on the afternoon/evening dives with us and he gave us a mini-lecture/reminder on the boat about shutter speed/f-stop/strobes. I hate all that technical detail, but I did a pretty good job answering his pop quiz about what the different components do. He recommended some settings for me… so I tried them out underwater and they SUCKED. He swam over to me and asked (underwater) if they were working out and I gave him a huge thumbs down. Then he messed with things a little more for me… and it seemed to be better, but I’m still a little baffled. Luckily I’m able to mess with things enough that I can get a decent shot when I want to. It’s all hocus-pocus I swear!

I also wore my new wetsuit (finally) on this dive. I’ve taken it on a couple of dive trips already without using it and it is finally time to bite the bullet to break it in. The wetsuit was soooo buoyant that I put on an extra EIGHT pounds!!!! Considering the situation I did OK, but at the end of the dive I was low on air and tried to do a safety stop… but I for the life of me couldn’t stay at 15 feet. I just floated right up. Ugh. The night dive was better and I was able to do my safety stop. My goal is to always have a dry wetsuit to put on, so I’d like to wear my old one in the mornings and then switch to my new one for the afternoon/evening. We’ll see how that goes (it’s going to be a lot of switching weights).

It’s pretty warm so I’m not wearing a hood. Last night my hair was such a mess. Even though I over conditioned it and brushed it in the shower I swear that I pulled half of it out of my head.

Jim gave me a preview copy of his iBook. It’s much better than the PDF. It has several pictures per species and you can search on any part of the nudi name you can remember. Then you can copy the species name and paste it to your dive log/spreadsheet.

Ghost shrimp keep photo bombing my nudibranch photos. I’d like to be annoyed but they are hilarious.