It rained again last night. I worried that the water would be rough again today, but it wasn’t. We bought some dramamine yesterday and took some before bed. We took another round this morning before heading out. I’m not sure if it was the drugs or the calm waters, but we were both fine all day.

We did our second deep dive today. We decided to do all our deep dives before Brett and Jess get here. I don’t think Jess enjoys going deep and there’s certainly no need to go deep to see anything other than wrecks. The wreck we saw this morning was the USCG Duane. I took the camera down in the enclosure with the big flash… and that full rig is pretty heavy. I took 18 pounds of weight today, which proved to be way too much. It’s easy to compensate for too much weight, but there’s no way to compensate for having too little. Tomorrow I may try a little less.

I definitely have no idea what I’m doing with the camera yet. So far it’s turning out pictures that are much worse than those I am able to get with the GoPro (and it’s old). Today I had the camera set to full-auto on the Duane, then I changed it to Program so I could force the flash each time. Neither setting produced any great pictures, so I think it’s clear the problem is the guy operating the camera. The other problem is that I ran the camera out of batteries shortly after starting the second dive today. I need to start with a freshly charged battery and only have the camera on when I’m using it. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

We have been to the Duane previously. It’s been down a long time and has a lot of growth all over it and there’s a lot of fish and other life all around it. Today we did some swim-throughs that were really cool. I don’t think we would have enjoyed them without our spotting lights. Such a great purchase. There were a few moray eels and some larger angelfish among the other fish, but obviously the wreck itself was the main attraction.

Not far from the Duane is Molasses Reef, which is part of a protected marine park. We moored our boat above a spot called the aquarium, which was probably our favorite dive spot last year. It proved to be amazing again today. It’s quite a shallow spot, but that’s exactly what we needed after the deep dive this morning. We went slow and took our time looking around. It was exactly the kind of dive you want at the kind of location you want if you’re trying to get some good underwater shots. Unfortunately, I was not. My camera battery had died not long after jumping in. That’s the only sad thing about it. Everything else was awesome. We saw a bunch of stuff… Nurse sharks, a reef shark, a bunch of free-swimming moray eels, an octopus, angelfish, porkfish, goatfish, boxfish, damselfish, filefish, butterflyfish, yellowtail snapper, parrotfish, shrimp, grouper, and even an arrow crab. Oh, did I mention barracuda? They were everywhere. It was hard to go to work instead of going back out on the boat after lunch.