Weird, Awesome, Fun, Damn

One of the two frogfish at Sabang Wreck.

I prepared to do a fun dive today charging my batteries and checking the seals on my housings for my digital camera and strobe light. I was a little rushed because it takes some time checking batteries and making sure all the seals are clean. For breakfast I had my usual oatmeal and coffee while I listening to Sara Bareilles and Morcheeba.

Stick pipefish.

It was a beautiful bright and sunny day, perfect for diving. When getting ready for the dive I met Matt who worked for Divephotoguide.com who had a nice camera set-up that got my attention. He’s a very nice, down to earth guy that I befriended fairly quickly. The first dive of the day was to Sabang Wreck with Alli as our guide, Grace doing her Divemaster mapping exercise, and Matt and I taking pictures.

Manila puffers herding a school of catfish.

The dive was good with good visibility, three small wrecks, and some good sea life. It was just great to have a dive where I didn’t have to do any skills I was to be evaluated on—I just took pictures. Among other things, there was a black and red frogfish pair on a wreck, a stick filefish, orangutan crab, a nudibranch I’ve never seen before. The most interesting thing I saw was seeing three pufferfish herding a school of catfish at the end of my dive. Weird.

Nudibranch.

While waiting for our next dive, I learned that Matt’s boss at Divephotoguide.com is a professional underwater photographer who knows David Doubilet—one of the greatest underwater photographers who shoots for the National Geographic. I admire Doubilet’s work a lot and consider his book “Water, Light, and Time” one of the best underwater books. Matt also pointed out that the camera setup he is using was previously one of Doubilet’s. Awesome.

White nudibranch with orange dots.

Sea horse.

For our second dive of the day we went to the dive site called “Hills”. This time Divemaster Ruben guided us and Maziar joined us for some pictures. We started our dive in the shallows seeing a cluster of giant clams. I found a really interesting white nudibranch with orange spots. In the later part of the dive we saw several different types of nudibranchs, and a few seahorses, A great, mellow, shallow dive good for seeing lots of little things. Fun.

Later in the evening when listening to my music I accidentally pulled out my speaker which was connected to my iPod. The iPod drag out and fell onto the tile floor. It hit the floor solid and hard but still played music for a while. After playing for sometime though, the iPod ceased to play on an Alice in Chains song. It never worked since. Damn.


- jason