auchmeddan

Well, there was no hurricane. Nate was downgraded to a Tropical Storm, and we saw some wind and some heavy rain. And that was that.

Over last weekend we got in 3 dives and finished our Rescue Course. The highlight of the dives were the Smooth Trunkfish (we saw them on every dive) and the Moray Eel I spotted on the Darlington. I may never have noticed it if it hadn’t been for it’s 3 Coney bodyguards I first caught sight of it slipping over the reef and down under a rock.

We hung for a while and watched the little guy breathe (he was about 18 inches long) while the Coneys gave us dirty looks. They obviously wanted to get back to hunting with it.

The Rescue course wrapped up on Sunday, and Ondrej used Vlad’s camera to take some photos, which are up on his website. In between sessions I took off my mask, and managed to catch a tiny little Sergeant major in it. Ondrej managed to get a photo which, although it is a little out of focus, shows how small the little fella was.

Jules has now signed up for the DiveMaster course, which will take quite a bit of time to complete. Jules has been studying books the last 3 evenings, preparing for her first pool session tomorrow.

Oh, I almost forgot. Before we went out diving I was hanging my feet in the water off the back off the dive boat’s swim platform down at the dive shop in Somerset. After a few moments a Scrawled Cowfish came up to investigate my feet. I found wiggling my toes would sometimes draw him or his partner back. I was telling Jules about it a few minutes later, and dipped my feet back in the water. Sure enough, he came back up almost immediately, but this time he moved closer and closer to my foot, his mouth opening and closing all the time. I moved my foot to protect my little toe (as it was obviously what he was aiming for) and he moved in and nibbled the side of my foot. He was quite intent to get me, so much so that his horns were out of the water when he bit! It was a weird feeling, as the mouth is big enough that I could feet a bit of my skin inside it. It was quite a funny sight….wish I’d had the sense to have my camera close at hand.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Bermuda, Diving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.