Flame angels and other stuff.....

We're busy for the next little bit with a student and several certified divers. Today we had a rather strong north wind from a front that was passing by, didn't do anything to the diving but it made it look kind of rough 'til it settled down mid-day. Conditions have been pretty reasonable, we had a bit of a swell last week, but Thursday was really the only day that it made for crummy conditions. I've not personally been in the water since Wednesday, tomorrow that'll change as I plan on working with the student. Cathy said it feels as though it's cooled off the last couple of days, so it'll be curious to see if I'm noticing it or if it shows cooler on my computer. We're getting into that time of year where if a big north swell comes in the temperature drops a degree or so.

We had a fun group on the other day. I thought I'd mention it because the entire boatload was very good on air. I'm thinking the shortest dive for any in the group was in the 70 minute range, and we had two divers hit the 100 minute mark (that's real good on air and we don't see that all too often) on one dive.

Blogstuff... I added a little mapping widget on the sidebar. If you click on the map you get a larger map and can see where clicks are coming from. It's kind of interesting to see where people are popping in from, and sort of amazing that that type of information can be tracked.

So here's another Flame Angel (Centropyge loriculus). I took this one using the long zoom/no flash diffuser and hope for the best method I mentioned several posts back. These guys are generally so shy you can't get within 5' of them without spooking them into the coral within seconds. Recently I found one that seems rather unphased by close company with divers, but I didn't have a camera in hand that day. I'm hoping it's there the next time I visit. Flame Angels have a very small territory and once you find them you can almost count on seeing them at the same spot (I really mean spot, often within a foot or two) an a frequent basis. If we brief Flame angels, that generally means we know exactly where it's going to be.... I've got a flame angel at one frequently visited site that I've been watching since early 2005 that I've seen all but 3 or 4 times I've been there since finding it. We're coming across more of them all the time as there seems to be a bit of a bloom of them lately.

Later,

Steve