After making a 10 day exploratory trip to Thailand I can say, I sure hope I get to go back. Here is what I learned from the trip.
If you can break the flights into multi-day segments, do so. What did I do: I flew Dallas to Doha, Qatar (about a 15 hour segment) Doha to Phuket, Thailand, (6+ hours) with a multi-hour layover in Qatar. Even though all the segments were on 777’s, flying 20+ hours is just a beating. I hope next time I can break the trip up into somewhat more manageable segments. Dallas to Hawaii, after a couple of days in Hawaii to …. (you get the point, hop skip and jump style flying).
If you fly the trip all at once, get a day room when you land. I did and I was very glad to be able to sleep 5 hours and then go find the sail boat I would live on for 10 days. Oh and having a pool at the day room was good too since after all of that flying I needed a way to stretch out the muscles that had been cramped up in those airplane seats.
Thai food is awesome. Every meal I had was great. Now many of the meals I had were on the catamaran, but the meals I had on shore were also great and ridiculously inexpensive. Try finding a restaurant in the U.S. where you can get a main course and a drink for $6 U.S. at dinner. Do be careful, the Thai’s like their food spicy so get the tourist version of the meal at least until you figure out how spicy you like it.
After flying as long as you have to in order to get to Thailand, get a Thai massage. Compared to what you would pay in the U.S. they are very reasonable. $400 baht or as of this writing about $12 U.S.
porcelain crab fishing for dinner
5. If you are an underwater photographer, plan on shooting more macro than wide angle. From Phuket where I got on the boat, until we had sailed down to Phi Phi island, the water reminded me of the Platte river in Nebraska; too thick to drink to thin to plow. We did not do any diving for the first couple of days of the trip because the water visibility was too poor. Diving would have resembled the Helen Keller diving school, you see with your hands and not with your eyes. That said there was plenty to see topside.
Koh Hong
6. If all you shoot underwater is macro, you are going to miss some great wide angle shots. If you think about it for a moment, you will probably realize that the abundance of particulate in the water is food to fish. And, yes we did see some amazing schools of fish on quite a few of the dive sites. So if all you shot was macro, you may have missed shooting the enormous fish aggregations.
There were three divers on the other side of this school of fish. I couldn’t see them, can you? Now I could swim through the school of fish to find them, but I think I’ll take a shot or two before I do so.
7. The long tail boats (see the first picture above) are everywhere and you do need to be careful where you surface. Near Phuket the long tails are powered by what looks like an old chevy engine.
long tail boat
The engine is attached to about an 8 foot transmission with a propeller at the end. That system allows the long tails to operate in very shallow water with a draft of about a foot.
For divers long tails can be bad, because if you get hit by the prop you will look like a frog in a blender. Not a pretty sight. As we got further from Phukett the long tail boat engines were smaller so that towards the end of the trip they were running with what looked and sounded like lawn mower engines, but even those engines could deliver a lethal blow to an unsuspecting diver. We surfaced as a group and made sure we had our smb’s deployed during the safety stop.
8. Be ready for current. Cozumel Mexico has current, for the most it part goes one direction. The Cozumel port authority shuts down diving if the current gets too fast or the weather gets too bad. The water around Thailand has current; its fast and it doesn’t necessarily go in one direction on any given dive. There is no port authority monitoring it. Early in the trip we anchored the boat, threw out the tag line and the pool was open. One of the guests jumped in with a noodle and before he came up he had reached the end of a 50 foot tag line. We moved the boat and got out of that current. So watch the current it can be fast. Dive with locals who know the local currents.
Those are the big points I learned from the trip. More on the dive sites later…
Unlike most of my posts, I have included more about how we got to Fiji and more details about the travel rather than just focusing on the dives.
Day 1 of our trip was a lot of flying. Dallas to San Francisco was about four hours and uneventful. I had worked until noon that Thursday, the day we were to leave, and then went home to make sure I had all of my gear ready. I had packed over the preceding two weekends so I needed to make sure I had not forgotten anything in the packing process. We were picked up at the house at 3 p.m. We left Dallas late in the afternoon and had a several hour layover in San Francisco. We ate at an airport restaurant; the food was passable, but nothing special.
The flight from San Francisco to Nandi airport in Fiji, was not a lot of fun. We left San Francisco around 10 p.m. local time. The flight was 10 hours of feeling like a sardine in a can of sardines. There were a few empty seats thank goodness. We probably should have paid for the upgrade from coach. The seats were close together and food was crap. Hardly slept a wink. Nancy took a sleeping pill and then was awaken several times while she was trying to sleep. We flew over the equator and over the international date line. We started the trip on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Fiji early on Saturday.
Our early arrival in Fiji at 5 a.m. local time on Saturday was uneventful. We collected all of our luggage, fortunately it all arrived, and cleared customs without any issues. Based on travel advisories we had received I had split up the camera equipment in my backpack. I had put two camera bodies and multiple lenses and a focus light in my photographer’s vest which I wore so my backpack would only weigh about 15 pounds. My backpack would have otherwise weighed in at over 40 pounds. Once we got on the plane I had put the equipment back in the backpack and put it back in the overhead. The games we play to avoid another bag fee of $200.
The temperature in Nandi was pleasant, almost cool. From the airport we took a cab to the local yacht club that advertised it was open for breakfast at 7 a.m. We drove by a spa that advertised day rooms, which didn’t look to be open. We would later learn that it was open, oh well. The yacht club didn’t actually open until 10 am. We got lucky, we met Andrew from a local dive shop who let us park our bags while we got breakfast. (I wanted to try to do a dive or two with Andrew and his shop after he was kind to us, but unfortunately our travel plans would not allow us to fit it in.) In a local restaurant in the marina near the yacht club we had breakfast. I had a Fijian breakfast burrito scrambled eggs with mushrooms in a tortilla. It was pretty good. Who knew I had to fly to Fiji to have a breakfast burrito? After breakfast, we moved the gear to the yacht club and tried to rest. We both slept on what looked like bean bag chairs. After we slept for a while we ate lunch and tried to stay awake until 5 pm when we met the crew from the boat.
We were met at the yacht club by Steve and Georgia, the base managers who had been our crew on a trip we did in the Pearl islands of Panama. They introduced the crew for our trip, Julian the captain and Jim the first mate, both from Fiji. We met the other guests on the trip and had a round of drinks while we waited for dinner. Dinner was a lobster dish and Fijian ceviche, which were very good. The rest of the evening was pretty much a blurr for me because of the lack of sleep. I finally got to sleep and slept until just past sunrise local time. Making the adjustment to Fijian time did not seem to be too difficult, but 17 hours of time differential did make it a bit tough to figure out when to check on things back at the office.
Day 2 in Fiji: The sky was somewhat overcast with a little wind but otherwise nice. The clouds meant that I could still take a sunrise picture even though I got up a bit late.
Sunrise on day one of the boat trip
We ate breakfast around 8 a.m. while under way. I don’t think captain Julian put up the sails until after breakfast although we sailed until around noon.
We were on a 59 foot catamaran which is a luxury boat in the Trade Winds system. To say that the boat is very nice, is an understatement. There is quite a
bit of room for the guests to read and sit around on the boat and watch the islands go by while the boat is underway. The state rooms are good sized and there is plenty of storage space for cloths and camera equipment. We were traveling at about 4-6 knots under motor and sail. My underwater housing was stowed in the diving equipment compartment. The marine heads are well designed and are efficient. The marine toilets were push button flush and seemed to work without getting stopped up. (This is a vast improvement over the first trade winds boat we sailed on in which to flush the toilet you had to hand pump water into it in order for it to flush. Also, on the old boats there was little if any air conditioning. And, electrical plugs were at a premium. The new luxury boats are much better at providing the creature comforts that are easy to get accustom to using). There are two U.S. electrical plugs on each side of the bed and more plugs up in the saloon where the kitchen is located. At 59 feet in length there is plenty of room to house the eight guests. Air conditioning on the boat works well, and it was on each evening so we could sleep well.
We had breakfast while underway. The food was excellent. Jim was a chef at a prior job and it shows. He is one of the better chefs we have had on the trade winds cruises. We did not have the typical trade winds menu, I suspect that is impart related to what food staples are available in Fiji, but the difference was refreshing. By midday, Chris, one of the guests had caught a tuna that probably weighed 10 to 12 pounds. The tuna was good as sushimi, and as sushi.
Chris hooks a tuna
We reached our destination before noon. We snorkeled for about an hour before lunch. Then after lunch, I assembled the underwater camera housing and went back out and snorkeled for another couple of hours with the camera. There were several things about the snorkeling that struck me. One, the variety or corals was significantly greater that what we are accustomed to seeing in the Caribbean.
Second, the health of the various corals appeared to be very good. Third, while some of the fish looked somewhat familiar, but in different colors, there were a lot of fish that were quite different from what we were used to seeing in the Caribbean.
blue green damsel fish and stag horn coral
By the time I got out of the water, the light was going down. The clouds had rolled in so it was a pretty over cast day; consequently, it got dark fairly early.
At dinner we learned that we would go to manta strait and see if we could see any manta rays snorkeling the morning. We anticipated we would do a dive later probably after lunch. Out of the guests we had 6 divers. One of them, Len, a retired attorney from Nevada was 82. I decided I would keep an eye on Len just to make sure he was ok. When you think about it, it is pretty impressive to be able to strap almost 50 pounds on your back and then be able to go diving. I sure hope I can continue to dive until I’m 82, of course that does assume I live that long.
Day 3: We had clear skies and we went snorkeling at manta bay right after breakfast. Just before we dropped anchor at manta bay, a sea plane landed and coasted up to the manta bay resort, which not surprisingly, sits on manta bay. Now seeing a sea plane land and take someone up to a resort is not something we see every day in Dallas.
sea plane at the manta resort
Unfortunately, no manta rays showed up at manta bay when we were there, but we did find an octopus and a lot of other sea life.
After our snorkel we sailed to sand dollar beach. When we got there, I looked down at the wall near our anchorage and said “lets go diving”. Well that didn’t work out. I suspect in part because getting tanks refilled in the Yasawa islands is not very easy. And, unfortunately dollar beach was a bit rough with the surge and current to see much snorkeling. Later that day Julian moved the boat closer to sand dollar beach.
The coral break was mostly dead, and we didn’t find many sand dollars. We talked about going for a night snorkel, but I was pretty tired so I gave up. The food was good. Beef tips at lunch were great. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, bacon and pancakes. Good thing we are snorkeling quite a bit otherwise weight gain would have been a challenge. I was hoping that the dive in the morning would be worth waiting for.
Day 4: Julian moved the boat back to the early anchorage at Sand Dollar beach. Visibility at the beginning of the dive was excellent. We weight checked Len and with 10 pounds he was fine. Weight checked Nancy with a new wetsuit and 24 pounds seemed ok, but she did have problems getting down. Jim said he gave her some more weight to get down. I chalked it up to first dive of the trip jitters. Unfortunately, the weight distribution was not even according to Nancy so she felt like she was going to roll to one side. Mid-way thorough the dive visibility got really bad. Then Nancy’s computer told her she only had 2 minutes of air left; when I got to her she was checking the analogue gas gauge and it showed 1000 pounds of gas so I helped calm her down and she stayed down for the rest of the dive. Meanwhile I had seen a sea krate so I went back and checked it out, got a picture or two before it was time to do the three minute safety stop. Visibility went from great to crappy mid-way through the dive and then back to good, then we had to turn around. So I suspect between the visibility, the computer malfunction and the new wetsuit, Nancy was not enjoying that first dive too much.
Sea krate, Laticauda colubrina
After the dive, Julian moved the boat to another “Y” island. We did some snorkeling after we anchored. Later in the afternoon we went into the village on the island where we had a kava ceremony. Everyone had to put on a sarong, even the guys. The ceremony was pretty interesting. They offered us Kava drink which looked and tastes like dirty dishwater. Afterwards the locals danced and sang for us. It was quite a nice ceremony. Captain Julian explained that Kava ceremonies had been abused in the past by outsiders who would come in engage in the kava ceremony and then not leave for a long time, all the while expecting the villagers to feed and house them. Nice work if you can get it, but I guess they now ask how long you are planning on staying at most if not all of the villages. I guess even paradise has its challenges.
A sandy beach on one of the Yasawa islands
The village we visited has maybe 300 people. Most are older men and women, grandma and grand pa age folks who tend to be fisherman or farmers. Then there are young children who are going to school.
Going back to school
We walked through a preschool school and saw some of the youngsters who attended.
Even in school what is outside is more interesting than inside
Most of the people from the village who were in the 18 -40 year age range were either away at school or had moved out of the village to live and work in the cities in Fiji to make a living. Most of the people who live in the village appear to live a subsistence lifestyle. Len was our honorary chief for our group and they made a nice lei for him and for everyone in our group. The people living in the village were nice people.
After the Kava ceremony we took the dingy back to the boat and then had vegetarian lasagna which was ok. Sorry, I just like meat protein, so it’s hard for me to get excited about vegetarian anything.
Day 5: I woke up early around 3:30 a.m. because my left ear was bothering me. Too much water, with no drops. I found some hydrogen peroxide and treated both ears then took an ibropen. I was hopeful the hydrogen peroxide would take care of the problem so I could keep diving. (Fortunately, the hydrogen peroxide did the trick and I was fine).
So far on this trip I had taken almost as many topside pictures as I had taken u/w pictures, which is out of character for me; but I did have to do something on those long sails. And, besides we had only done one dive so far. The snorkeling had been good, but it’s hard for me to get excited about snorkeling since the angle of the shots are for the most part overhead shots which rarely produce usable results. Diving down and trying to clear my ears with each breath hold is a challenge since my ears clear slowly and by the time I got down to depth I would typically have very little time to compose an image. In my mind snorkeling is not particularly useful.
Since I was up early I noticed the lights at the back of the boat seem to attract quite a few little fish. Every now and then a needle fish which was maybe a foot in length would come up and try to get a free meal. It didn’t appear that he was particularly effective in his hunting.
By 6:30 a.m. the light was starting to come up and it looked like we would have at least a cloudy morning. There was a little wind, but not more than 3 knots. The water was very still with hardly a ripple. It looked like the sun would come up over a mountain which usually means we will probably not have much of a sunrise.
Sometimes its good to be wrong about what the sunrise will look like
Well I guessed wrong, it turns out it was a pretty nice sunrise. I even managed to capture on video of the some of the sound of the waves crashing on the beach and the sounds of roosters crowing in the morning.
Day 6: Thursday; We had a long sail in the morning. We stopped at lunch and had a snorkel. The coral was pretty, but the viz was a bit iffy maybe 50 feet of viz. We had lunch then sailed south to Mana island. We did a dive on an uncharted dive site. Huge bommies, not a lot of fish. I’ve named the site, “Can’t Bommie Love”.
Can’t bommie love dive site
I got a few shots but viz was pretty poor and with little fish life the bommies were okay but not spectacular. We had Indian food that night on the boat. I was thinking, hopefully we will get tanks filled and go diving on Friday. We did sail out to where they filmed Blue Lagoon. Yep it is pretty, and we did another snorkel.
Blue lagoon
Day 7: Friday; tank fills are taking quite a while. One compressor, 3 whips and 50 tanks ahead of us. At least the bay is beautiful. Only a handful of boats. Read and responded to several emails before breakfast. Sunrise was a bit boring; no clouds so not a lot of character to the sun rise. I guess the resort that is near us has been closed for 4 months because the “Survivor” series rented it all and closed it so they could film nearby. My left ear is still bothering me but it clears alright so it must be an outer or middle ear problem. Food had been good; bacon and quiche, plenty of food. Getting bored waiting for the tanks to get filled.
I suspect once the tanks are filled we will head off to a dive site and dive it then head closer to the port. By 10 a.m. it looks like some of the tanks have finally come back. I checked the tanks after I picked one up and said it felt light. I unfortunately was right, the tanks had been hot filled and only had about 2700 pounds of air. So we left the tanks in the sun and let them warm up so with heat expansion they would register about 2900 but pressure would drop once we hit the water. Because the tanks are being filled so slowly, Jim stays at the shop filling tanks and Julian takes the boat out to a nearby reef. We wait for Jim and the dingy and the last of the tanks out at the reef.
While we were waiting to arrive we did a snorkel around the reef and we see several sea planes land which was pretty interesting. Nice way to get to a resort. After Jim gets back to the boat, we do dive 3 of the week, which is a site known as cabbage patch. We start over white sand and drop down to about 30 feet and follow the sand down to the reef.
divers swimming toward the cabbage patch site
One of the early creatures we encounter is a huge broadclub cuttlefish. Steve took some video of him and them I took a couple of stills. The cuttle fish just sits there, but he changed colors a few times before he swam away.
Broadclub cuddlefish
We eventually dive deeper down and see the cabbage patch which is a huge patch of plate coral. Among the leaves of the cabbage patch there are three schools of fish.
The cabbage patch
I take a few stills and then a few videos of the moving schools of fish. We continue on until we hit 30 minutes of dive time and then we turn around and head back. On the way back, I saw a couple of interesting tunicates and a few more schools of fish. When we were about to make a left turn to get back to the boat, I notice a sea krate at the bottom so I dropped down and watched him hunt for food. Sea krates are pretty animals despite being quite so toxic. And of course, there is no anti-venom for them so if you get bitten, you are dead. I got close to the sea krate, but he largely ignores me while I am videoing him. After I finish filming the sea krate, we head back to the boat and it’s a pretty good swim, several hundred yards back to the boat. I deploy my smb on the way back and carry the flag back since there is some boat traffic in the area. It was a good dive with excellent viz and interesting wildlife.
At the boat we get the gear hung on the sides of the boat so it can dry. The boat now looks like the streets of Milan where they hang all of the laundry out to dry. Bummer, it’s the last dive at least on this part of the trip. Fortunately, we will have more dives on the second half of the trip. I checked some of the images from underwater. I did get some good ones on the dive and on this part of the trip. I will put them away for now and start new cards. All of the weight restrictions for the airlines mean that I have to make some hard choices about what gear I bring. And, I left the netbook at home to conserve space and weight. So I wasn’t able to edit any of the photos until after we returned to Dallas.
This part of the trip has been good. Julian and Jim were excellent as captain and fist mate. I ‘d sail with them again. Sure wish we could get a compressor on the next boat.
For the most part, when I travel, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I expect to see when I arrive at my destination. Typically before I leave to go to a destination, I have looked at one or more photo sites to give me a sense of what I may be able to see, and shoot, when I get to the destination. Many times I have done some research on the accommodations that we will be staying at to make sure we don’t get an ugly surprise. It is rare that I am surprised, and even more rare that I am pleasantly surprised. I suppose based on all of the traveling I have done, I am spoiled and have very high expectations. And yet, a pleasant surprise is what we found in Taveuni at Paradise resort.
In five days of diving, I did 15 dives, 3 dives a day, and each of the sites we saw were different and I did not grow bored with the sites becoming too similar. Fiji is famous for being the soft coral capital of the world. Paradise Resort which has relatively quick access to rainbow reef is in my mind the epicenter of soft coral diving. Keep in mind, to be interesting there must be a pretty good current that runs through a dive site with soft coral to adequately feed the soft coral and keep them open and beautiful.
Most of our dives we did on slack high or slack low tide, so the current was not completely rippin’. After one of our dives one of our guides pointed out a place where the current was racing through near where we had been diving. The current looked to be well over 5 knots and if we had been there we would not have been there long!
Soft corals and a blizzard of fish
If you want to be able to push a big camera through the current, be prepared to bring your big blade fins. I wore my dive rite fins and left most of the people on our trip behind. Split fins may be comfortable, but leave them for water that doesn’t move as much. And be prepared to be well fed at the resort. Big engines need lots of fuel!
Back at the resort there are opportunities to shoot macro shots, with nudibranchs and the house reef has resident blue ribbon eels and other macro subjects.
A juvenile anemone fish trying to hide in an anemone
During the week, we saw sharks, but because there is no feeding of sharks in the area. The white tip sharks did not approach our group and were content to sleep just off the wall in water too deep to dive. We also saw two enormous Napoleon wrasses that each would have weighed well over 300 pounds. We saw several dozen pilot whales on our way to several of the dive sites and a pod of dolphins as well. Sure it would have been interesting to get closer to them than 20 meters while on the surface, but I was quite content to be able to observe them from afar. So when will I go back to Paradise Resort, as soon as I can find space in my schedule. I will plan on spending at least two weeks there next time.
In my opinion, apex predators are very interesting. From what I have observed they are curious and will investigate what they think might be food. If there is food in the water they will take an easy meal.
This is why you wear the suit
Sharks unlike people do not have hands which might otherwise allow them to tactically check out potential meals. So what do they do, they taste potential entres with their mouths. Now that might seem bad, it can have a bad effect on anyone the shark chooses to sample.
Grey reef shark at shark junction
So I keep thinking they sure are interesting but I ill try to avoid becoming a meal,
Sea Star wreck with railing and sun ballThe last time I dove on the wreck known as the Sea Star off the coast of Grand Bahama, the ship was intact and it was relatively easy to circumnavigate around the exterior of the ship. The ship may have had a small list to one side but it seemed to be otherwise upright and easy to tell that it was formerly a ship.
In December 2016 a hurricane went through Grand Bahama and did quite a bit of damage on the island, but also changed several of the dive sites that are just off shore from the island. The Sea Star went from looking like a ship to being torn in about half and left in the shape of an “L”. It certainly opened up the cargo hold.
And, while many parts of the ship were almost unrecognizable, towards what was the stern of the ship there were still parts that looked similar to what we had seen of the stern in our previous visit. And, some of the sponge life was undisturbed by the storm.
The new “foot print” of the Sea Star does give some interesting views that previously either didn’t exist or were not as recognizable.
It will be interesting to see if the sea life that previously grew on the Sea Star re-establishes itself in the coming years.
Some days I think about all the types of certain critters I have seen and then think that I will probably not see something new on the next trip. It sure is nice to be wrong. During the last trip to Grand Bahama it was awesome to see a loggerhead turtle up close.
I had only seen a loggerhead turtle one other time and that was from a boat deck. The last time I saw one it was only for a brief second because he popped his head up only a few meters ahead of our catamaran and then ducked down again as he saw we were sailing right towards him. I don’t think I have ever seen a turtle move so fast. Now he was never in danger because he would have passed between the two pontoons of the boat without any problem. Nevertheless, because I was close to the front of the boat I could see just how enormous he was. Most turtles I have seen have been maybe a few feet across the bottom of their shell. The fellow who swam under the boat was easily 2 meets across the bottom of his shell. If I had to guess he must have weighed several hundred pounds.
The loggerhead turtle I saw in the Bahamas raced through the dive site, right past a bunch of divers. He was huge — well over 500 pounds.
At first I did not see any reason for why this turtle seemed quite determined to “motor” through the site. It was only after I took the first shot that I saw why. Maybe having a grey reef shark following you is no big deal for a turtle that weighs several hundred pounds.
But then again, maybe having a large shark following you is just an annoyance. I really don’t know, but even if I had a hard shell, I don’t think I would mess around with those teeth. So maybe swimming through the circle of divers was the idea after all. We were the bait.
Oh yeah, the turtle took a right angle after passing me, and the shark just kept swimming straight. Who says turtles are slow.
I was thinking about the dives we did in Nassau and it occurred to me that it was some of the most diverse, and productive diving I have had a chance to do. Day 1 we spent a fair amount of time diving with gray reef sharks. Even before the feeding began the sharks were remarkably cooperative in positioning themselves so that they made interesting models.
Grey reef shark swimming overhead
The first day we did two shark divers at shark junction with the Stuart Cove dive shop. Dive one was pretty mellow and while there were quite a few sharks, the 18 divers on the boat never got particularly close to the sharks since they were curious, but at best aloof. The second dive was a shark feed and it was interesting to watch the sharks come in and be fed. There was quite a bit of bumping and jostling for position by the sharks. The divers were all pretty well out of the line of swimming, except for the shark feeder and the photographers who had chain mail suits.
Here is a brief video from the shark feed.
And did I mention the wrecks? There are lots of them and many of them have appeared in one or more movies.
And some of the wrecks are just interesting because their structure has an amazing amount of growth that has accumulated on them.
Imagine this: clear blue warm water. Loads of fish, and a wreck or two to explore. Sounds great, it is.
We sailed a catamaran into Anguilla and tied off in a small bay waiting to go diving the next day. Where we moored was near a small mini wall so we got out of the boat with our snorkels and explored the mini-wall. There were a lot of fish, mostly sergeant majors, but some puffer fish and few grunts. I was feeling lazy so I didn’t take the camera. I figured I would wait until the next day to rig it and used it for the dives we would do the next day.
In Anguilla they require that you use a local dive shop to lead the dives. They say that it is required in order to make sure the divers don’t abuse the reef. I suspect it is really more about keeping the local economy working.
Nevertheless, we the following morning our dive guide arrived and we then went diving on the MV Commerce. The Commerce had been sunk about 20 years before as a purposefully sunk ship. It was a cargo ship before its sinking. It was in relatively good shape for having been down as long as it had, but there were places where the hull had rusted away and there were many places where sponges and coral had grown over the hull. As we were diving I noticed a turtle swimming over head and he appeared to be swimming to the bow of the wreck.
I wasn’t quite sure where he went after he crested the top of the ship so I keep exploring the wreck slowly making my way towards the bow of the ship.
After rounding the bow, I began swimming down the port side of the hull. It was there I found the same turtle. He looked like he was about the take a nap. So as not to disturb him, I made sure that my approach was down below the top of the hull. I estimated about how far down the hull I would have to swim and then I popped over the hull with my camera and took his picture.
I got off only one picture before he swam away. Sometimes it pays to be stealthy.
Its been a while since I was last in St. Martin, or St. Marteen if you prefer. It is not a place that many divers go, but it is a place that attracts a lot of yachts and super-yachts. We were there sailing on a catamaran that was part of the Trade winds fleet. One of my favorite dive sites on St. Martin was a place called turtle reef. Now if you look on most maps of the island you will not find a dive site called turtle reef. We dove with a shop called Octopus diving. They picked us up at our boat which was anchored in Grand Cass. They were well prepared and whisked us off to the diver sites for the days diving.
We did not have far to go. I had not even finished kitting up before we were there. The buoy marking the dive site was not much bigger than a plastic coke bottle. You would probably only find the site if you knew the gps coordinates. After our briefing, Keith and I were ready to get in and see what the site had to offer.
Our expectations were high that we would see a turtle. Viz was pretty good and the site was basically a small pinnacle that rose from the surrounding depths to within 15 feet of the surface. It was a sunny day with lots of light. The site was full of fish life. There were grunts galore, but for much of the dive, no turtles.
But towards the end of the dive the dive master spotted a turtle heading to the pinnacle from much deeper blue water. It was a rather large hawksbill turtle and he was not at all concerned about the presence of a couple of divers.
Hawks bill turtle grazing on sponges
Would I go back to turtle reef? Of course, any day you get to dive with turtles is a good day.
According to my critters book the crustaceans in the Caribbean can be divided into shrimp, lobsters and crabs. Now assuming we are just talking about seeing these critters underwater, I tend to find the variety of crabs to be the most interesting. Now that is not to say that I do not find the various lobsters to be interesting, its just the variety of crabs seems to be more diverse and that is interesting to me. There are about 45 varieties of crabs in the Caribbean. The largest of which tend to be the channel clinging crabs. I have seen them on quite a few dives in Belize, Mexico, Cayman islands and Dominica. That is not to say they do not live elsewhere in the Caribbean, they do. I just have not had the opportunity to see them.
Now, it seems to me that hermit crabs are the most common crabs I have seen. I have seen them on just about every island or islet I have visited. There appear to be about 11 varieties of hermit crab in the Caribbean, and they range in size from tiny to enormous.
An enormous claw for a polkadotted hermit crab
When I was in Cayman Brac this year, while I was diving on a night dive I looked up under a part of a coral ledge and found a plumed hairy crab. He was very shy and very quickly after I got a shot or two of him he crawled back into his hiding hole in the reef.
plumed hairy crab
Arrow crabs almost always make me laugh because they remind me of daddy long legs, but when they are hunting if they are very successful, they stick their prey on top of their heads and just keep hunting.
arrow crab hunting for dinner
For me, some of the most productive dives for finding crabs, have been night dives. I guess that is not surprising since that is usually when crustaceans hunt for food. Inasmuch as it looks like I still have about 30 varieties of crab to see, I am going to have to do alot more night dives. 🙂
On the trip to Kona I did 22 dives during a week spread out over 20 dive sites. The dive sites were sprinkled along the Kona coast over about 60 miles of coastline. Each site had its own unique characteristics, but there were many similarities. The hard coral for the most part looked pretty much the same.
Before each dive we would get a dive briefing and I would alway being listening to get a sense of the types of animals that we might see during the dive as well as about the reef structure and other features of the particular site. Of course, I was always trying to get a sense of whether I should rig the camera for wide-angle shooting or macro. Many times I would ask the crew the night before whether I should rig the camera for wide-angle or macro because it takes quite a bit of time to get the camera set up if I have to change from one setting to another.
For the most part the crew was pretty good at estimating whether the next day would be good for wide-angle or macro photography. Nevertheless, as Murphy’s law would suggest there were times where I guessed wrong. Now shooting a small animal with a wide-angle set up is not the end of the world, it’s just frustrating. (Kind of like being asked to hit off the golf tee with a putter or sink a put with a driver. Yes, it can be done, because I’ve tried it, but I don’t recommend it. For me and golf it just adds another layer of frustration to an already frustrating game.)
Halgerda-terramtuentis, –yes that little blob on the left hand corner with the iridescent skin is a nudibranch
Shooting a macro subject with a wide-angle lens is similarly frustrating. If you get the critter in the image you end up cropping to the point that the image ends up pretty small. And, you rarely get the detail that I would want to see with a macro lens. In this instance, you could count the spots on the little guy’s back. Now he was less than an inch in length so trying to find him was just dumb luck. Nevertheless, there he was on dive 20 and I doubt that anyone else saw him. Now of course, one of my recurring dreams is to be able to swim with and shoot whales, but with my luck it will probably be a day when I’m rigged for macro. I will probably get a good shot of the eye and then be relegated to shooting barnacles on the whale’s back. Oh well it would still be a good story.
Sometimes when we are underwater, we see cooperation between fish from the same species hunting for food. When I see that kind of behaviour, I think, now that is an interesting cooperative skill. Nevertheless, when we see fish or other animals from different families cooperating to hunt for food together, that is unusual and is well worth watching.
When we were in Hawaii I was somewhat surprised to see a white mouthed moray eel team up with a tivoli to hunt for food.
Now in the middle of the day to see a free-swimming moray eel is fairly uncommon. But to see a free-swimming moral eel hunting with another species of fish is even more unlikely, and certainly is interesting — at least to me. I watched this pair swim together and chase several smaller fish into holes in the reef. I did not see them have any success in hunting. But I could imagine that a ray which could easily get into relatively small holes in the reef could be a very helpful hunting buddy. I could easily imagine the ray either catching and eating a small fish in the hole, or chasing out the small fish into the awaiting jaws of the tivoli. Of course the opposite could be true. the tivoli could chase a smaller fish back to the reef and into the awaiting jaws of the moray eel.
Similarly, on several occasions I have seen snappers hunt with southern rays. The first time I saw that behaviour was on a shark dive in Playa del Carmen. We were waiting for the sharks to come in when the first pair through the dive site was a southern ray and snapper apparently hunting for scraps. I was just hoping that I was not part of the scraps. Now I have seen the benefit of these partnerships between rays and snappers on several occassions. The ray stirs up the bottom looking for food and the snapper gets the left-overs that squirt out the gills of the ray. I have seen southern rays feeding with a snapper in Cayman Brac, Belize, and Mexico. I suspect this kind of cooperative hunting goes on all over. Regardless of how often it may occur, I still never get tired of observing it.
Second, the health of the various corals appeared to be very good. Third, while some of the fish looked somewhat familiar, but in different colors, there were a lot of fish that were quite different from what we were used to seeing in the Caribbean. 
Some days I think about all the types of certain critters I have seen and then think that I will probably not see something new on the next trip. It sure is nice to be wrong. During the last trip to Grand Bahama it was awesome to see a loggerhead turtle up close. 
I got off only one picture before he swam away. Sometimes it pays to be stealthy. 
On the trip to Kona I did 22 dives during a week spread out over 20 dive sites. The dive sites were sprinkled along the Kona coast over about 60 miles of coastline. Each site had its own unique characteristics, but there were many similarities. The hard coral for the most part looked pretty much the same.
