We had two mantas for the entire dive tonight. It was nice to do the dive again. We'd cancelled a couple night trips due to big surf, and then rescheduled a trip to tonight because there'd been no mantas for a few night after the heavy surf. It worked out well. Nice dive, good conditions, water was 75 degrees.
Yesterday I dove the bay where we do the night dive and there was lots of apparent change due to the surf. We run the dive at a site called "Garden Eel Cove". The garden eels have been viewable at about 52, feet but yesterday I had to go down to 72 to see them. The group in shallow had moved out, hopefully they'll return quickly. Throughout the bay, wherever there wasn't something living, there was a fine layer of sand to be found. No serious coral damage though.
Yesterday there was another whale shark in the area. A couple boats were able to spend some time with it while we were on our first dive. We went looking for it after our first dive, and saw it on the surface for a few moments, but it moved on before we could get people in the water with it.
Here's a pic taken at a turtle cleaning station the other day. Turtles will lay down and present themselves and tangs (aka surgeonfish), in this case yellow tangs, will come to the turtle and eat the algae off the turtle.
Aloha,
Steve
