It's World Turtle Day, so here's my favorite turtle picture I've taken to date! It's always fun to see a turtle on a dive, especially when they are chill or even curious about us. This individual in Bonaire was not bothered as I snapped some pictures against the backdrop of the beautiful blue water.
Clownfish of the day: OK, one more clownfish to share. This time we have tomato clownfish in the beautiful reefs of Apo Island. Wide angle photography is not my specialty, but I really like this reef scene with the clownfish moving through the huge anemone arcing across the surface, giant clam in the foreground, and soft corals in the background.
My dry suit recently sprung a small leak in the wrist seal. I decided to do my own wrist seal replacement, so I wrote up a blog post about it. This isn't a full tutorial of how to do it - I'll leave that to the pros. This is more meant as a tips and tricks/overview of the process to help others decide if they want to do it themselves.
I've put 2 cold water dives on the new seal and it works great!
Picture of the day: Following up on yesterday's picture of the Jellyfish Nebula, I have a picture of a Lion's Mane Jellyfish. This species can get very large, but this one was small.
Just published a blog post about how to replace your fiber optic cables on your underwater photography rig on the cheap! Underwater photography is expensive, so let's save a few bucks where we can. I have been shooting with these cables for awhile and they are very reliable.
@ai6yr@schof@mlanger a bunch of friends of friends got BBQed on that boat. Until that happened, that operator was seen as one of the better ones on the West Coast.
As with all things, safety regulations are written in blood. I haven't been paying attention to what's happened since then but I'm hoping there are some better regulations for new ship construction at least.
Meanwhile liveaboards in other countries burn down with some regularity. One just burned yesterday.
It's always disappointing to see invasive lionfish on Caribbean dive sites, as they devour the local populations and have few predators. That said, they are visually interesting, with so many different colors and textures warning predators about the venomous spines.
@webcubus They look great. I only saw a few smaller ones last time I was there. It seems putting them on the menu (Lionburger) and organizing Lionfish hunting dives helped quite a lot.
@plaimbock they sure are tasty! We had fresh-caught lionfish ceviche on a liveaboard and it was fantastic. They are certainly around in Saba, St. Kitts, and Turks & Caicos but not in huge numbers.
I've seen Queen Angelfish on every trip to the Caribbean, but this is my best picture to date. They are quite large and have an amazing collection of colors and patterns. Sometimes they follow feeding turtles around and munch on whatever the turtle stirs up that doesn't make it into its mouth.