Around the reef and into the night

As the sun began to hang low in the sky, we geared up and headed for our next dive. Again we descended and again we crossed the sandy bottom to locate the next reef. We stayed relatively deep on this dive which kept us a bit farther away from the bustling of the dense coral above us, but even in the depths, life was abound. Beautiful blue tipped coral delicately hung along the fringes of the great mount of coral where larger fish such as butterflies and angels darted among it's branches just as the small damselfish do on the smaller branching coral.

Again I ran into the six barred angelfish cruising the reef fringes although this time it was not particularly interested in being anywhere near me.

More familiar faces appeared such as the moorish idols, butterfly fish, and crinoids. Having taken lots, although not all spectacular, photos, I decided to focus this dive on taking some video to share my experiences with the folks back home.

I also managed to catch the dancing cleaner fish that arches its back and thrusts forward to signal its availability for service. The relationship between the many reef fish and this little cleaner wrasse is mind boggling, the huge number of species that need to recognize this behaviour and the amount of time, evolutionarily, for all these species to adapt to accepting this service rather than eating or scaring the cleaner wrasse away is phenomenal! I am sure by now my dive buddy was wondering what I was looking at given the large angelfish swimming around and getting little attention from me.

We continued to venture round this reef, looking for the adjacent reef that our guide had suggested we would see. Unfortunately we were well on half way through our dive and I decided for the group to take another turn around this reef that we had already circled once since we couldn't make it to another reef.

Of course, it was no surprise that we found even more on the second time around. A few oddities reared their heads as the light began to fade. Bird-wire rock cod were sitting still hoping we wouldn't see them, which of course made them very photogenic and batfish with their amazingly deep body hung out in their "bat"caves.

The big surprise of this trip was the sighting of a small shoal of marine catfish! There is a reason you rarely see marine tanks keeping these amazing little guys; they are venomous and loose their shoaling tendencies as they grow to 30 centimetres. Another reason is that there are very few fully marine catfish species and I considered it a real privilege to get to see them.

We ascended with the light fleeting on the horizons and reset our gear for the night dive. With some food in our bellies I took the time to hear about Mary-Ellen's snorkel. She was one of the only snorkelers and decided to just lounge with her pool noodle off the small reef at the stern of the boat. She relaxed while enjoying large schools of fish swimming all around her in a twister of colours. Before we knew it, the moon was out and we were tugging our way into our cold wetsuits for the night dive.

Our flashlights in hand, we headed to the comparatively unexciting reef below the bow of the boat. I was a bit disappointed we did not head to one of the proper reefs but decided to just enjoy the dive. The camera, which I am still working out compatibility between the strobe and camera, was far from set up for taking night pictures, so the shots were taken without the strobe using just the camera flash and flashlight. As you can see in the first picture, there was a lot of back-scatter and the camera had difficulty focusing, so I do apologize for the lower quality of these pictures. Again we saw some of the same characters from the reef, the large blue sea stars and christmas tree worms.

This time however, the sea urchins joined the echinoderm parade, as long spined sea urchins emerged from the coral rubble just far enough to be visible but still well within the safety of the matrix.

I decided early on to just put the camera aside and enjoy the dive given that I couldn't really take many pictures that would be of any quality. There were large red sea bass cruising the reef around us, darting in front of us, and causing me to jump as this half metre fish appeared out of the gloom and then disappeared. I did manage to find a sleeping parrotfish with its protective mucus cocoon but lost it quickly as I attempted to share the experience with the other divers who were not particularly aware of what was going on around them. The big excitement for me here was the sleeping catshark. Although I did not get to see the entire animal, I was able to see the eye, gills, and spiracle on the head, as well as the tail. I attempted to take a picture but mostly all you can see is his dark spots on the tan skin.

The dive leader signaled our ascent and we headed up, seeing a large group of very small fish tightly balled against the surface, corralled by the ascending bubbles of the divers. Our gear off and dry warm clothes on, we settled down for the evening, with Mary-Ellen and I heading to our bunks early to try and catch up on sleep.