Another brick in the wall

Well it was that time to brave the elements and head East once again to jump of a perfectly good boat. Fortunately the wind was running ENE at around 10 knots so Captain Nige did us the honour of throwing us off at McCurley's Wall on the North side, which you can never get enough  as it really is part of the best section of wall on Grand Cayman.

Regardless of how many times you do it and which direction you go, there's always such fantastic scenery with some epic sponges and colours both East and West, on top of the wall and at depth, take your pick!

There was a mild Easterly current pushing against us but is was easy enough to drop down and use the wall for cover whilst getting some shots in. There was a hell of a lot of barracuda, snappers and fusiliers hanging around on the wall, as well as some really nice big channel crabs and neck crabs which was just the icing on the cake for this dive.

With the rest of the group on the turn around at 18 minutes, we still had plenty of bottom time and gas to enjoy the wall all to ourselves for a while before shallowing off and watching some stingrays having a play in the sand on top of the wall.

Captain Nige reliably informed us that there also an eagle ray hanging around as well but had cleared off into the middle distance as soon as it saw the horde of divers approaching.

Vibrant red sponges

Upon surfacing, the clouds that had been gathering like an evil cloak of darkness had buggered off and we had blazing sunshine for the rest of the day which my sunburn will attest to. Thank goodness for aloe aftersun!

So we had Sarah doing her "shoop shoop song" dance-along on the boat ride down to the Fish Bowl with Linda being the sensible one and staying well back out of the way.

The Fish Bowl was an ok dive, but it made you work really hard to find the good stuff, especially when it had a pretty stuff surge in the shallows which made macro work even harder. But on the upside there was an absolute riot of tritonia hamnerorum and elysia crispata everywhere. I thought there had been an explosion in a nudibranch factory!

Lovely little tritonia hamnerorum and eggs

Some more tritonia hamnerorum on a different sea fan

And one of the many lettuce leaf slugs strewn all around

The coral heads proved to be rewarding with some lovely roughhead blennies hiding our amongst the algae and some broadstripe gobies on the hard coral to while away the dive time.

Ans lets not forget the gratuitous sex scene ably provided by two flamingo tongue cowries. Cue the 70's porno music! wacka-chaka-wacka-chaka-wacka-chacka, bow-chick-a-bow-wow! Ohhhhh yeahhhhhhh..........

Thanks as always to the boys and girls at Tortuga Divers as always, even if Kate did have to get up early and be fluffy and bouncy for everyone on a Sunday morning...........