Alex has over the last year or so gotten me in the water during happy hour many times, even with the elements often being against us either through weather or dive shops closing. Todays day of diving is cancelled as we have a Norwester on our hands .. boo hoo.
Anyway .. our dusk dive last night was a very awesome dive, mostly due to Alex’s eyes but there was so much going on .. almost too much. We were in the water for fish spawning as normal, after the last few times of watching and learning their behaviour the process of photographing it became ever easier especially with the SLR capabilities of the D60. There were not many hamlets around, many Rock Beauty’s and also quite a few butterfly fish .. all of which have a very noticeable courtship process. Eden Rock the reef we were at had so many fish on it though that at first it seemed to be putting off some of the mating fish, however they soon became unaware and went about their business. The odd thing is for the first time of doing this dusk diving photography other fish were getting in the shot .. I’d often get a blurry blue chromis flying past in the background .. looks cool but takes away from the object of the photo. At the same time a very friendly turtle cam up to play and it is the second time I have touched a turtle and let me enhance this wording for you by saying rather the turtle touched me. Once in the east end a turtle came up and literally shook my hand .. a breath taking moment that was ruined by a moron of a diver who grabbed the turtle and started throwing it around. I won’t get into that story but there was some unpretty scenes afterwards between myself and him.
This turtle did exactly the same thing .. and I didn’t notice until looking through my view finder he was too close to photograph with my macro lense on.
The highlight of the dive for me though was the great shots of the hamlets I got followed by a wicked Flying Gunnard right as we were finishing up our safety stop before exit.
Mucho thanks of course goes out to Dave and Paul at Eden Rock for being good friends who comp us on our diving on a regular basis.
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