tiggymalvern: (diver)
2019-09-23 06:01 pm
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Nudibranchs!

We dove the San Juan Islands on Sept 9th with Bandido Charters, at Bell Island and then Broken Point at Shaw Island. Unfortunately we'd had a weekend of thunderstorms and heavy downpours and the visibility was the worst I've ever had it in the San Juans. On the upside, the last time I dived Bell it was covered in nudibranchs, and that was true again for this dive. So that's mostly what's in this video. I saw 13 different species that day.

tiggymalvern: (fantastic!)
2019-06-09 05:07 pm
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Grand Cayman Reef Diving

Wreck-free diving from Grand Cayman! This was our first day of diving there, and we visited three really lovely sites - Eagle Ray Pass, Barker's Reef and Hepp's Pipeline. It's always nice when someone takes you to a place called Eagle Ray Pass and you actually see eagle rays :-)

Featuring a barracuda with a big scar on its nose, barred and indigo hamlets, pretty but unwanted lionfish and the fishy oddities that are the filefish.

tiggymalvern: (last paradise)
2019-05-28 06:25 pm
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Doc Poulson, Gran Cayman

Another wreck from Grand Cayman, an 80 foot long cable laying vessel so a much smaller boat, but a nice contrast with the Kittiwake because this shows the growth that accumulates when a ship has been down there for nearly 40 years - this one was deliberately sunk in 1981. Added at the end, a couple of clips of fish from the adjacent reef - a trumpetfish which chose to swim backwards for some odd reason, and a 'zorro fish', better known as a Masked Hamlet.

tiggymalvern: (diver)
2019-01-22 04:31 pm
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Caribbean Reef Sharks, Cuba

Yes, I still have a ton of video I haven't edited from the diving trip to Cuba last year. I've been busy! But I'm making a start again...



The Caribbean reef sharks at the Gardens of the Queen in Cuba weren't shy. Often they were curious creatures who meandered by for a closer look. There were plenty of them around too - by the third day of diving, I'd stopped filming every shark I saw. Unheard of!

The inhabitants of the Gardens of the Queen are entirely protected, with the exception of invasive species, like the lionfish. So our guides did a spot of lionfish spearfishing, and the aroma of fish blood completely changed the behaviour of the sharks - suddenly they were faster, searching sharks.

Lionfish have no natural predators in the Caribbean, but a program in the Cayman Islands has successfully been training groupers to eat them. So we fed lionfish to anything that looked interested - the yellowtail snappers were happy to munch on lionfish innards, and so were the sharks...

The divers had our own lionfish dinner back on the boat too, although we had ours cooked first. As usual, watch in HD, although even then some of the youtube encoding is making me cry. Apparently the seagrass is far too much for it to cope with....
tiggymalvern: (diver)
2018-09-21 10:09 pm
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San Juans Diving

We did two dives from Lujac's Quest boat last Saturday. After all the rain on Friday, I didn't have high hopes for the conditions, and our first dive at Allan Rock was about what I expected, with around 15 feet of vis. It was a lovely drift dive along the wall, though, with LOTS of nudibranchs and large rockfish shoals, including some of the biggest black rockfish I've ever seen. The second dive at Davidson Rock was the shocker - out of nowhere, there was 40 feet plus of visibility, with huge fish shoals and vibrant colour all over the walls. I dived Davidson Rock back in June and was a little disappointed - what a difference the conditions make! If visibility in Puget Sound was like this more often, I'd probably do more local diving...