Capturing the Moment

A beautiful swallow tail slug Gloomy Nudibranch in the sand   Magic Island, Oahu   One exciting thing about exploring a new island is finding new wildlife. Even though Oahu is less than 100 miles away from Maui, there have been underwater wildlife sightings here that have never been seen in the waters off Maui. Almost all of the fish are the same, but what we are looking for can be a whole new ball game. Nudibranchs. In the definitive underwater invertebrate guide book, Hoover's "Hawaii's Sea Creatures, a Guide to Hawaii's Marine Invertebrates", many of the more rare nudibranchs were spotted here on Oahu. And many of those were found at Magic Island. So that is where we headed for our next exploratory Oahu dive. Leaf Scorpionfish Saddleback Butterflyfish   We started our dive in the Magic Island boat channel in about 5ft visibility. We have found this muck to be good nudibranch habitat in the past, but after finding only one gloomy nudibranch...

Dwarf Moray Eel White Mouth Moray Eel    Moray Heaven!   Back on Maui for a quick visit we had to fit in a dive at one of our favorite shore dive locations, five graves. This is the same location that all the tour operators have dubbed to be "Turtle Town", but we weren't going diving for turtles. Instead we look for nudibranchs, frogfish, and other hard to find creatures that may escape the usual glimpse from the snorkel masses.   Our dive quickly turned into a moray eel bonanza. We had several dwarf morays, cute little 6-8 inch fully grown, and some huge white mouth moray eels about 3 ft long. An undulated moray showed off its razor sharp teeth and a zebra moray contrasted with its toothless grin. As I tried to get a picture right down the mouth of the undulated a large fish swam in between my camera lens and the eel. This happens sometimes as I concentrate on getting the picture, but this time the fish stayed there, which is a little abnormal. So I glanc...

Can you see the frog fish?   As a scuba diver and an adventurer I spend a good deal of my time underwater. I always wonder if I just sat underwater for a while without moving what I would see come by. But I usually come to the conclusion that I wouldn't see quite as much as when I kick off in search mode which was again the outcome for this dive here. The dive boat Maui Diamond dropped us in for a drift dive just past the point in front of Pu'uOlai cinder cone on the south shoreline of Maui. Clear water and a depth of only 35 feet or so made for some great photos. We came across a couple of turtles including a huge one hanging out inside a big cave. It took me several tries to get an acceptable photo of the turtle in the cave because of the difficult lighting. I ended up using my strobe to light up the turtle in the foreground while keeping the bright light at the cave entrance from flooding out the background.   A few more turtles and nudibranchs were found after the...

  This morning I grabbed my macro setup to try and find some small underwater wildlife to photograph. Sometimes when you slow down and really look it can be amazing how many little creatures start showing up. I went to a dive site called five caves, aka five graves. It is a spot very famous for sea turtle encounters which means these little animals get passed over even more often than most.   Nudibranchs, harlequin shrimp, scorpion fish, and even peacock flounders showed themselves on this dive. It wasn't until I saw a couple of neon yellow juvenile frogfish that I knew who was going to steal the show. Surrounded by a cloud of tiny plankton the frogfish would open its mouth and gobble up some of the goodies.   These are Commerson's frogfish and will grow to about the size of a volleyball if they get old enough. Right now they could easily fit into the palm of my hand. Once they get bigger they will graduate from eating plankton to eating fish. They are one of th...

The ghostly visage of the tallship Carthaginian Heidi, Mary and I planned an adventure almost too big for one car, to kayak out from the shore with all of our scuba and camera gear and dive the wreck of the Carthaginian. The Carthaginian is an old tall ship that I've written about a couple of times on this blog. Feel free to search for the other post/dives done here using the search feature on the website. Located about 90ft down on a sandy bottom this ship is mostly visited by tourists remaining dry aboard the local submarine which zooms around the wreck and nearby waters. I expected to see the sub at some point on this dive and it showed up out of the blue right when we descended to deck level on the wreck.     While the submarine is quite loud with its electronic propellers it still took Heidi a while to figure out it was right behind her. She was much too determined to find the elusive frogfish rumored to be hiding out on the wreck to look for a huge underwater s...