Diving at Snake Island and Arco

Our first dive for the day was at Snake Island - a sunken island in the middle of the sea. I love the name of the site because it sounds like some Pirate inhabited island from some movie. The dive site is called Snake Island because there’s a lot of sea snakes that swim around there. The sea snakes are extremely poisonous - 10 times more lethal than a black mamba snake. The dive at Snake Island was fantastic.

A feather star swims to a new location

Early in the dive, a snake swam across our group. Then a feather star swam around and landed somewhere; these are common in the reef but rarely have I’ve seen them swim. I later found an odd looking red scorpion fish with a yellow mouth, a snowflake eel, large puffer fish, and two banded sea snakes intertwined in a soft coral.

Two snakes swim out and are attacked by a territorial fish before swimming away.

When I went in close to take a picture of the two snakes, they were curious of me and swam up my camera. They then swam out into the open and were attacked by a small territorial fish, and then swam away. This was definitely the highlight of my dive. At the surface we hung out on the boat and ate lunch. It was a beautifully sunny day and the water was glassy calm.

Lunchtime break. I guess you can't complain.

In-between dives Dawn takes a nap.

The next dive, Arco, was also a good dive. We descended 90 feet to look for a pygmy seahorse in a sea fan. We didn’t find one but we did see a large frogfish, lionfish, nudibranchs, and two moray eels. I didn’t see the second eel until it swam right in front of me while I was taking a picture of the other; I was a bit surprised.

A nudibranch crawls along some macro algae.

A frogfish lays still on coral.

After the dives I just hung out at the dive shop with all the others. Talked to Dawn more about Korea and all her travels. Ate dinner at Hayahay and hung out at the usual Oops Bar!.

- jason