Day 93 - 8th May 2010

We met John & Andy from' Deep Down' at 'Zest' this morning for a debrief of the Documentary course, lessons learn etc  I think for the first Doco, it went very well, as you can see in the previous post.

This afternoon, Simon and I are both diving and with our camera's for a change.  It's seems like we've been out of the water for weeks.  We were both pretty excited especially with not having any fun divers to lead.     Todays first dive was at 'Twins'.  The visibility was pretty good.  In the water, we decided to search for the sea horses which we knew roughly where they were but have never actually found them as they are away from the main pinnacle. Ten or so minutes into the dive I spotted a Pipe fish, a long stickish looking creature then just a few meters away there was a little Cow fish just bumbling around on his own.  These fish really remind me of the small box fish but with horns  ...very cute. Simon will upload the vid.

Time just seems to fly when you're filming and towards the end of our dive we bumped into Jace, one of the videographers  who pointed out the whereabouts of the sea horse.  On our way over and to my amazement, I found another, just by itself blending in against a small rock.  They were much bigger than I had imagined, although different species do vary a lot.   If all I had seen the sea horse on that dive I would have been happy.

Our second dive was at the wreck just off of 'Japanese Gardens'.  I dove there a couple of weeks ago with Nathan for the first time but Simon hadn't. The boat itself, sank probably just under a year ago and the marine life that it's attracted in such a short time is incredible.  

There were 2 sleeping trigger fish inside, a yellow box fish, a puffer, schools of bat fish and sweetlips to name but a few.  We only spent 15 minutes there as we were close to hitting our no decompression limit and then had a 10 minute swim back towards the boat at 'Japs' in hope of seeing the Eagle rays.  Unfortunely we didn't see them but we weren't too bothered as the visibility was not that great.

On both dives sadly we both noticed an incredible amount of coral bleaching which is due to the rise in water temperature (32degrees)

This evening Si's working on UK edits and I'm doing some research into coral bleaching.