Capturing the Moment

Clownfish safe at Home Jack over a huge coral head Our great Oceana adventure has taken us to the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef, straight out from Cairns. We signed up for a 3day/2night dive trip with ProDive Cairns. Our boat is pretty fancy with lots of showers, AC in the rooms, and wifi! How about that? We have 32 people, almost all backpackers, from all over the world. Most passengers are here to become open water certified divers, a couple are doing their advanced course, and a handful like me are just doing fun dives. The boat motors to one patch of reef, usually less than a mile long, and we dive after mooring. Then the boat moves on to another reef, unless we can do two different dives on the same reef. Our trip is 3 days long so we will get a maximum of 11 dives in. It is a pretty intensive way to really explore the Great Barrier Reef in a short time. The fish life here is amazing. The variety is huge, which is a big difference from my home of Hawai...

 Incredible Discovery Channel type action out at Molokini today! First I spotted a massive school of bait fish, mackerel scad, schooling up and eating plankton. This is not something I usually see, in fact the water around Molokini is usually devoid of much plankton. So it piqued my interest. I started my reef tour by taking my mostly beginner snorkelers out to see the bait ball...in 100+ ft of water!    After snorkeling a little ways down the reef I started seeing more and more large Sleek Unicornfish. Until finally I came to a spot where hundreds were gathered together in a rare spawning event. This is where the plankton was coming from that was feeding the mackerel scad. Male unicornfish were displaying beautiful courting colors and patterns as they chased females around trying to impress them. I took a video of the unicornfish in action and you can see the change in coloration and patterns on the courting males. I was amazed to see them change from all dark t...