Octopus, Frogfish, Turtles and more at Five Graves, Maui
The visibility at five graves, aka. five caves in Makena had been incredible the last few days so Heidi and I jumped at our first opportunity to grab scuba tanks and kick this new year off right. This is such a great place for green sea turtle sighting but this dive turned out to be much much more. We also usually spot very small nudibranchs here, but on this dive I brought my big lens, a 10-22mm super wide angle in hopes of some bigger creatures. We were in luck! I found this octopus staring out at me from on top of the reef. It was one of the biggest octos I have seen here. After a few pictures of it under a ledge it took off in a cloud of ink. That is when Heidi realized that this octopus was missing some of its arms. Different wounds can be seen on the head and mantle of the octo as well. Their main natural predators are moray eels but this guy was so big that I think he must have had a run in with a hunter of the human kind. People love to eat octopus out here in Hawaii....