Scuba Diving Vacations

I'm hoping this is about as cold as it'll get this year. When I first moved over here it was 74. I thought it was bath water. 2000 or so dives later, it just seems cold. I've met a lot of people who've moved here and dove without a wetsuit for a while, then moved up to a shorty, then a full 3 mil... and so on... a fair number of the full time DMs and Instructors here are even wearing 7 mil full suits. I've got enough built in insulation that I can tolerate a 3 mil full as long as I keep the number of dives down to one daily. The second dive of the day I really appreciate throwing on a shorty under the full suit. My primary employee is also a Captain and Instructor, so we generally rotate duties and each get 1 dive in and 1 on the boat.

The last couple of days have been nice diving for me. The water's been settling down after the most recent swells, but it's still kind of murky for here. Viz at the sites I dove ranged from about 50-70 feet. Today the whales were singing quite loudly at our first dive site, which I dove. I thought I'd be real clever and turn the camera to video mode and record the songs... I'd forgotten that I turned the mic off, so it didn't turn out. Maybe next time. The whale songs made a nice soothing background for a 75 minute dive though.

I've been seeing more Flame Angels (Centropyge loriculus)this year than ever. I'm hoping maybe they're going to become even more common. I saw three total between yesterday's and today's dive. One I expected to see, the others were new to me. Here's a little pic, a bad pic anyway, to prove I saw one and give you an idea of the color of these guys. They are quite shy and dart in and out of the corals, one of these days I hope to get a good pic.


The pic at the top is of a Divided Flatworm (I've also seen them referred to as Tiger Flatworms), they are a type of sea slug we have here.

Later,

Steve