These Anemones should have pure white stocks and some very cool purple tips.
But when your strobe is struggling it lets the overwhelming blue tint of the water win out.
Not what you would call a “well lit” pixture… but kind of cool anyway, I think.
And, I usually get interested in the other side of them… as they are very often home to Hermit Crabs.
I often find some cool legs or even eyeballs (usually very blue) sticking out… and those almost always make a cool pixture.
But you know what… this side of the shell is pretty interesting too. A nice shape with some pretty cool textures.
He is a nice looking Spotted Moray… comfortably tucked in under a coral ledge.
That coral ledge was doing a great job of blocking the light from my strobe… leaving him in the dark on every attempted shot.
Then in a momentary flash of brilliance (pardon the pun, I just turned my rig on it’s side and viola… a nice smile beautifully lit.
My best chance for a pixture came on Day4… the day I was nursing my soon be be completely failed strobe.
This big fellow was all too happy to lay still and let me work my way towards him.
I shot a number of frames as I moved towards him.
Most of them were probably better pixtures… but it was only when I got this close at my ailing strobe threw enough light to create a keeper.
You dive in the morning… a two tank boat dive.
Then… you spend the afternoon in hammock, under the palapa by the sea.
These guys are too nasty to get big… those white tufts of bristles will cause a painful wound if you touch any of them.
But I thought you might like to see this one too… as it will give you an idea of why they are so darn hard to find.
Here’s a pixture of an Arrowcrab doing that same thing.
Had a little trouble w/ my strobe on this trip. I was firing but not at full power… so that’s why the sponge is a little bit too blue.
They are “cleaners” meaning that they remove parasites, dead skin etc from fish.
They advertise their willingness to perform this service by sitting near the openings of recesses or sponges (like this Purple Vase Sponge) and slowly waving their antennas to attract passing fish.
Definitely one of the many species of puffer.
But when I consult my fish ID book, I come away thinking that he has features of both the Balloonfish and the Porcupinefish.
I don’t know if this can happen… but perhaps he’s the love child of a cross-species relationship.
They are nocturnal hunters… so during the day you find them hanging out underneath the coral outcrops.
They have a tan to dark purple body with lots of gangly, spiny legs and antenna sticking out every which way.
They may be tasty to eat but they are, at least in my opinion, pretty ugly to look at.
They are a juvenile stage of the Smooth Trunkfish.
Perfectly round like a marble but very tiny… perhaps the size of the fingernail on your pinky finger.
They are, it would seem, territorial so they don’t cover a lot of ground. But their movements are abrupt and they are tiny… so getting a pixture of one in sharp focus can be as much luck as skill.
At first glance they look pretty ordinary. Not a lot of difference in color from the sand they sit on and kind of scruffy. In fact, I was thinking abandoned by the original tenant and perhaps the future home of a really big Hermit Crab.
And then a couple of things caught my attention.
There are sometimes tracks across the sand that lead right to these shells… and occasionally one of these “abandoned shells” would hop forward a few inches.
So I and my camera slowed down and got in close like we like to do. That is when I noticed that pretty much everyone of these shells had an eyeball that was looking at me.
A pretty special eyeball really… as it is on the end of a long tube. Giving the owner the ability to reach out from under the shell to see what’s going on in the world around them.
The good news is that we had two great dives today. We went shallow in deference to the strong current and had lots of critters to shoot.
The bad news is that my strobe problem has grown to the point where almost all the pixtures I’m getting have unusable lighting.
Did see a large turtle today, who was happy to let me get in very close… so I was able to correct for my lighting issue in post production and salvage this pixture.
Our 2nd dive today brought us the 2nd one of this trip.
Today’s find was orange/red, perhaps just a little bit smaller than the first of this trip.
He was well hidden amongst the soft corals that he clung too… but was very patient while all 8 of us jockeyed for a look and some pixtures.
Very near the end of our deep dive, my most excellent dive buddy, Miss Lydia… worked her spotter magic yet again.
The pixture above is the Reef Squid that she spotted w/ his camouflage on.
The one below is the same guy after he moved enough for me to get the blue water behind him.
But the famous Cozumel current did give me one memorable pix.
On our way thru the swim-thru… it gave my dive buddy some pretty cool Medusa hair.
Our 2nd dive this morning was #800 for me.
But even better than that Linda got to see a seahorse.
This is the girl who regularly spots things smaller than your thumbnail… and can take you back to the same spot tomorrow, to find it again.
But try as she might, she has never been lucky with the seahorses… this being only her 3rd one in 520 dives.
If have dove here, you need to know, Cozumel is all about the drift diving. We all jump off the boat descend and ride the current to see what we can see.
If you or your gear aren’t ready to go on that first morning of diving… you are most definitely a giant pimple on the ass of progress.
To avoid being that person… we like to do a check out dive from the shore whenever we can.
Today was that dive. Beyond checking out ourselves and our scuba stuff our expectations were pretty low.
But to our delight, we saw a number of small and interesting creatures… including this Golden Moray.
