My friend fats

Had an interesting day at Lighthouse with a monumental ripping Northerly current taking centre stage, even the fish were struggling to swim, but we did have some decent viz all things considered.

But the best laugh had to be watching a lot of very fat and unfit divers with rebreathers floundering at the surface at the start of their dive, with missing weights, missing fins, being too tired, being too hot, trampling the reef and a hundred other problems.

And this was just the start of their dive. It looked like ten beached whales along the shoreline I was tempted to call Greenpeace and get them to tow them out to deeper waters! Or if I was really mean, I would have radioed for a japanese whaler to harpoon them.......

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to knock other divers (much) but when you  listened to all their bragging and bravado before they got in the water, you'd have thought they invented rebreathers and gave birth to Jaques Cousteau.

After the whales had departed

After watching them for a while, we decided to cut out the middle man and jump right in and get down before we got crushed or accidentally mistaken for food.

The hardpan in the first 7 metres proved to be an absolute treasure trove for macro work with an absolute plethora of sailfin, roughead, secretary and orange saddled blennies along with a cornucopia of flamingo tongue cowries.

The gangs all here

Jill had some quality time with her new camera and her even newer strobe but conditions weren't really the best for playing around with settings and fine adjustment, which is a shame but there's always another day for a dive.

 We did also get a semi-reliable report of a seahorse just off the mini wall and we did go for a look but the current was so strong, if we had stayed there for a couple of minutes we would have been washed down to South Sound. And also the SAC would have been through the roof, so not worth the effort but there were some massive groupers and snappers riding the currents and looking as though they enjoyed every minute of it.

Hiding in amongst a small coral head was a lovely little gaudy clown crab that was a bit shy but he did stick around long enough for a quick candid shot.

But as always the best part of the dive was catching a nice little tritonia hamnerorum on the algae towards the end of the dive. It's not a good dive unless there's a nudbranch somewhere in there and indeed there was so everyone was happy. Well I was.

A happy little nudi

And for the record, after a very short dive, the whales managed to get back onto dry land and packed up about 25 minutes before us. Who needs a rebreather? ;-)

Post dive lunch, fresh from Chef Jen.