The weekend

On Saturday we went to Verde Island, renowned for great diving and it lived up to its reputation. Absolutely spectacular, and unfortunately for everyone who wasn't there I am still rubbish at wide angle and that's how I was set up, so you get minimal photos that don't in any way do The Drop Off site justice. It is also an amazing macro site but alas not recorded by me.

Tons of fish big and small, a very relaxed turtle, nudibranchs as far as the eye could see, barrel sponges teeming with little wormy things, spectacular corals of all varieties. It was marvelous and I've included just a couple of pretty ordinary photos to give you some kind of sense but nothing like the real experience.

Yesterday I continued trying to improve my wide angle skills. Slight and progressive improvement, still not great. We started at a wreck, which was lovely but way too crowded. Not my preferred dive at 30m which is always short, with the boat only 30m long and about 5 groups of divers crawling all over it. Nonetheless, I am very glad we did it because we saw 2 frog fish, one of my wish list critters.


One was positioned so I didn't get anything like a reasonable photo of it, the other also weirdly positioned, sort of upside down, but a bit more open. Being on a super wide angle lens it was not the best set up but I zoomed in as much as possible and at least saw them both, and recorded one in some fashion. I share this with you below, because who can resist a total weirdo?

We then did an afternoon and a night dive on Fantasea which as always was stunning. Loads to see, although I was trying out my buddy's magnified lens mask on the arvo dive and stupidly didn't take my own along just in case. I spent the whole dive responding to everybody's attempts to communicate with `I can`t see a thing`, and randomly pointing my camera at stuff and hoping for the best. Luckily the turtle below was good and Ran, guide and photographer extraordinaire, noticed I had my strobe set wrong and fixed it for me before this shot.



The night dive was wonderful, just a couple of photos below. A few others got some fabulous squid and cuttlefish, and my buddy got a couple of amazing shots of a moray eel catching and eating a damsel fish. She says she'll send me a copy so I share it.

I woke up at 3.30 this morning feeling the lack of massages yesterday and the day before, so I am heading back to Ruby today to fix me right up. We are doing the first site we did when I was underweighted and didn`t use my camera, which I`m excited about because it`s nudi city. Then a muck dive which is also a favourite of mine, so I am really looking forward to today's dives.