Our 10 days of diving in the Solomons with the Master liveaboard was amazing. Some things about the trip are quatifiable, 37 dives in 10 days is, a pretty big number of dives. The countless thousands of fish we saw was impressive. We saw large schools of jacks, fusiliers and barracuda. But the diving wasn’t just about the numbers. There were many story lines along the way that standing alone could make great stories. Consider one of the dives we did was named Simon’s dive site. Simon lives in the Florida islands and is quite a naturalist. He has among other things replanted coral on the reef on his property and has gotten the government to recognized his property as a nature preserve. His efforts have helped grow stag horn coral in places where it appears to have either not existed or which may have been in existence but needed to be reseeded. With growing reefs come critters. We did a night dive on Simon’s reef. Among the things I saw was a nudibranch that was enormous, almost 10 centimeters in length. Now I have shot this same species of nudibranch in other places such as the Philippines, but I don’t think I have ever seen one this large.

But the trip wasn’t just about nudibranchs or small critters. One of the things that stood out in my mind was just how healthy the reef was on all of the sites we dove. In paticular, the wide range of hard corals struck me.

But the soft corals were also quite abundant. Not since I dove rainbow reef in Fiji had I seen so many different colors of soft corals on any dives. Red, purple, yellow, orange and white soft corals covered many sections of the reef.

And of course there were a number of the usual suspects that you find in the coral triangle, such as clown fish.

But of course the thing that keeps me coming back to diving is the friendships that are formed by diving with people from all around the world.