Marjo lives down here, and was kind enough to take me diving today ... we had a great day. We did two dives ... both shore dives. First was in Cane Bay where we did a shore dive on a wall just off-shore. The dive shop was right on the beach and we walked right in. After a bit of a swim, we descended. It was my first dive in almost a year and I left the camera topside to get used to the water again. It took about 10 seconds. Marjo's sync cord wasn't working so I don't think there are any images from this dive ... Visibility was ok, but not great and there weren't any big animals about. I can see how this would be a great dive with a bit more viz.
After a quick trip through the rain forest, a visit with a local wise-man who collects junk and a fruit smoothie at the rain forest smoothie stand, we made it to the Fredericksted Pier. We got the local critter report indicating a big, yellow frogfish was in the hood and seahorse and batfish were out and about. We grabbed our gear and walked down the pier. I jumped in (about 10 feet down) and Marjo handed me the cameras and then jumped in, too. We swam to one of the old pylons from the old pier to look for the frogfish. Alas, we couldn't find it ... so we headed to the new pier to look for the seahorse. Near the end of the pier, we did indeed see a very large, yellow seahorse.
The pier was a cool dive. We were under for about 70 minutes. I brought the Oly and tried to figure it out ... it takes nice images, but the AF is slow and it takes 10 seconds to write a RAW file. Nevertheless, I managed to get a couple decent shots. I'll be here all week, so stay tuned ... unfortunately, I got no images of the seahorse. I had fouled up the settings by that point to try for a cool wide angle shot and couldn't get them back to what I needed for the seahorse when the time came. Oh well. Next time.
Thank you, Marjo!!!!
Here's a few from the pier:
