Post IV: Third Dive – Coral Canyon

Thursday, Oct 14th: After the second dive I met back up with my mom for a buffet lunch and a much needed nap. Filled with food and rested from the nap I went back out for the third dive of the day. My mom came along for this one and went snorkeling off the boat while I went diving. The third site was Coral Canyon and was the shallowest of the three (first was about 18M, then 16M, and the third was about 14M.) At the very end of the dive I saw a giant crawfish (lobster) and a little Valentini Puffer (Desmond). Quite the dilemma of which one to take a picture of! Thought my dad could use a photo of a crawfish to think about spearfishing so I went for that one. Pretty massive one! 

Robbs Jetty

Another two successful dives today! The first dive, which started around 1 P.M, was just Carmen and me. We set up our gear in the parking lot and then waddled over the dunes and into the water from the shore. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, weather.com was wrong and it was pretty overcast. Visibility wasn’t great in the water, so things would kind of appear out of no where. Pretty spooky but also pretty neat. We got a little lost and weren’t really able to find the old jetty so we just swam around and found one of the pillars before we left. As we came out of the water the sun started to peak through and we had a solid 10 minutes of sun. Lying on the grass field after just eating lunch and warming up in the sun after a dive seemed pretty hard to beat. 

At around 3 P.M, Simon and Bryon, two other members of the dive club joined us for a second dive. Simon and Bryon knew where to find the jetty so we buddied up and swam out again. This dive was much colder, but there was a lot more to see. Among the highlights were an octopus!, Western Smooth Boxfish which is similar to a puffer, some nudibranchs (these very colorful sea slugs – basically look like snails without their shells), a few jellies (which may or may not have stung part of my ankle, but that also could have been from my wetsuit rubbing against my skin) and some interesting looking corals. The octopus was pretty amazing … when we first saw it, it slid to the right and changed its colors just about instantaneously. So incredible to see – looked like a special effect from a movie. I almost caught the color change on video, but must have been a few seconds too late. Got a video of it looking back at me though, but maybe next time I will catch the color change. Pretty camouflaged, but can you find it?

Close up on its eye.

The Boxfish were pretty adorable, but very shy. They would swim away anytime you got near or showed any interest. Got separated and lost from Bryon a few times as I became distracted by one of these.

 Luckily Bryon and I were both using cameras so we would just start flashing our cameras to get the others attention. Here are the rest of the shots:

Partially Black and White

After about 45 minutes my fingernails were turning black and blue and I decided I should probably get out before I caught hypothermia. Definitely a fun dive site that would have been even better with improved visibility. Wouldn’t be surprised if I went back out there soon.