Night dive!!

Monday night I went on my first night dive.

Wow! It was beautiful, totally different from a daytime dive. There were five of us all together, each with his own light. Because each diver has his own light, each diver has a slightly different dive, sometimes sees different things. If one of us saw something cool, he'd hold his light on it to point it out to everyone else. But then we'd all move on, shining our lights different directions, looking at and for different stuff.

So what did we see? Starfish walking - no, cruising! - across the bottom. Night majors in beautiful deep blue and black instead of the darkish grey of daytime. A tiny goldentail eel scuttering across the sand and a huge green moray eel poking his head out. Eyes catching the light and shining out of the darkness. Lots of little squirrel fish. Red and white parrotfish asleep on the bottom. A scorpion fish my dive-partner Dale rousted from his slumbers

SCUBA diving is an adventure into a whole 'nother world. Night diving is a whole new adventure into another 'nother world.

Here's the really bizarre thing about that dive: I did better with my air than I ever have on ANY other dive. Usually night dive freak people out because they can't see. I was totally relaxed, issues at all and got more than 10 minutes more out of my tank than I usually do. I DON'T GET IT!! I wish I knew what I did differently so I could do it again on every dive.

The night dive was actually my second dive of the day. We went to the outside reef at Shacks in the morning. We saw the biggest barracuda I've ever seen. It was huge! And very beautiful gliding through the water.

I'm diving without my camera for a while to try to improve my air use and my buoyancy so there won't be any dive pictures for a while. But that's okay. Visibility on the dives this week (I've done four all together so far) has been okay for diving but not great for photography. And I will still take pictures snorkeling so you won't totally miss underwater photo fixes.