It’s a holiday weekend. All the boats are packed. Ours was no exception. We had 20 divers, 4 dive masters, and even a couple snorkelers on board. We were among the first to board and we got the premium seats close to the back. We also managed to get the best guide on the boat. If only I remembered his name so I could write it here. Unfortunately, I am terrible with names and his is now lost. But he had a plan to make sure we were the first group in the water at each dive location and it worked. There were a ton of boats at each location, so our dive master took us in a slightly different direction than all the other groups and it made all the difference.
Despite the name of our first dive location being eagle ray alley, we did not see any eagle rays. Seeing another one would have been amazing, but you can’t see unicorns every time you go underwater. If you did they would stop being magical. We did see a lot of cool stuff, and the conditions could not have been any better. The sea was not only flat, but there was no current, and you could see fish and turtles from the deck of the boat before even jumping in. Needless to say, it was a great dive. I saw perhaps the biggest lobster I have ever seen today. I was trying to get a picture of a black spadefish and suddenly it appeared behind the fish. I failed to get a good picture of the lobster and the rest of the group had moved on so I gave up. Lack of photographic evidence or a testimony of another diver means I basically didn’t see it or it wasn’t all that big. But I swear it was huge. It was as wide as the arms on my camera contraption.
There were a lot of parrotfish, barracuda, and eels. We even found one cool spotted eel that kept going in and out of the reef. We followed it for a minute or two before other divers figured out we were seeing something. Because of its quick movement among the shadows, it proved a difficult target for my camera.
As we arrived at the Wellwood dive location, we could see an eagle ray swimming parallel to the boat. That was exciting. We hurried and threw our gear on and went down before anyone else. We got first class tickets to the eagle ray show. He came at us really fast, turned and then stopped to look around, then took off again. I took a bunch of pictures, but none were fantastic. Our dive master told us not to chase the ray, he thought it was circling our area and if we just stayed calm for a minute it would be back. He was right. It came in again and did another loop before disappearing. I could watch them swim for hours.
The rest of the dive was pretty amazing as well. There were tons of huge barracuda, gorgeous queen and french angelfish, and blue tangs. Then we came upon a medium-sized loggerhead turtle just sitting there waiting to have his picture taken. I was happy to oblige, though my shots didn’t turn out as crisp as I would have liked. Still, I can’t complain; it was really great to get so close for so long. After playing with the turtle we also saw trunkfish, porkfish, blue striped grunts, hogfish, sergeant majors, more ells, and then a massive barracuda and a big lobster to round out almost a full hour underwater on that amazing dive. I wrote in my dive log that it was one of my favorites. It really was.
