Tuesday, July 29, 2008

It's 1am and I'm winding down from the manta dive....

Aloha,
I pulled a double today. I've been working pretty much straight through since the 16th, luckily I don't have to turn right around and get up for a charter tomorrow as I have to get up at a bit after 6 am to make the morning charters. I've been up since 5:30 yesterday, these doubles turn into long days for me. Tomorrow's a day off - to go to the dentist.... yuck. After that I have another busy stretch. August is panning out quite nicely so far, with lots of charters but still plenty of space available to add additional divers.

The manta dive tonight was kind of weird. The plankton (small shrimp/crustaceans and other critters that the mantas feed on) has been pretty light the last few evenings so the manta numbers have been a little light. Tonight was primarily fly-bys, where the mantas come in to see if there's anything worth sticking around for. Luckily at the end of the dive there was a manta feeding beneath the boat tied off to us so our divers got a good closeup view for several minutes.

Here's another frogfish photo from yesterday... it's a bit too reddish, I'd probabaly want to play with it a bit if I were going to print it up, but I like that you can look into it's mouth a bit so it's a keeper for me. This frogfish is the same one that Pat took a photo of and I posted a couple months back. Cathy and Bob have been watching it for several months, I'd only dove the site twice since Cathy found it, couldn't find it (the frogfish) the first time, but this time I did. It's grown a fair amount since the first photo. It's surprising how fast they grow. I'd always thought it took much longer for them to get up to size than it really does.

Later... gotta hit the hay before I slump down on my keyboard...

Steve

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Steve,

Very interesting photo. What type of SLR did you use to capture this frogfish in action? Wish I could sample the dive spots in Hawaii sometime. - gary

Steve said...

I shoot with a Cannon G9 point and shoot. There's no action in this photo... the frogfish was just sitting there with it's mouth slightly open. When they actually feed, their entire mouth unhinges and extends forward and engulfs it's prey in something like 16/10,000ths of a second. Occasionally they'll yawn and fully extend their mouth for a half second or so... I saw this several months back right after I'd turned off the camera - bummer, I'd have loved to have had a shot of that.

Steve

Anonymous said...

I love your slideshow off to the right. Is that new? I hadn't noticed it before.

Steve said...

Thanks Kate - at least I suspect it's Kate, let me know if I guessed right - I could be completely wrong.

Someone from wowzio e-mailed me the widget and I installed it a day or two ago. You can click on any of the pictures and it'll send you to the post.

Aloha,

Steve