On our 9th day at Beqa Lagoon we decided to do a couple of dives with the new crew who had just arrived. We were sitting on the fence as to whether we would be diving today. We had already exhausted our dive package, and Mark and I were feeling pretty wiped out from a whole week of diving. Mark was feeling tingling on his face, which he had only previously felt after doing decompression diving in Cozumel. So naturally, we thought he might be feeling something akin to the bends. Ultimately, we decided to go for it. The symptoms weren't painful and it wasn't getting worse with time so we were pretty sure he wasn't experiencing DCS. I also felt we would be missing out on all the action if we sat these dives out. The crew that had just arrived was really cool and it would be fun to go diving with them.
This group, whom we had met at dinner the day before, weren't part of any dive club but were different couples and a single thrown together. This made it easier to converse with them. The single of the bunch was a distinguished lookin Aussie gentleman with a marine biology background who told us about the coral reef rating scale, which is part of the "coral watch" organization in Australia, and which I had never heard before. Coral health is rated on a scale of 1 to 6 and is judged by the potency of it's color which is indicative of the health of the photosynthetic organisms (I don't know their names) residing inside. He rated the house reef a 1.5 out of 6, which convinced me that it was hardly worthwhile to explore it.
Others in the group included a cool, well travelled, and well-tattooed Aussie couple, a San Jose couple, an Arizona couple and a couple from Long Beach who invited us to stay at their house if we would ever to visit the upcoming Long Beach Dive Expo.
Given that the marine biologist was only diving at Beqa Lagoon for one day, and given that coral health was so important to him, we were hoping that the dive crew would take us somewhere that represents the best that Beqa Lagoon had to offer. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. It was many of the peoples' first day of diving in over a year and the dives we were going to do would be checkout dives. There was too much current to do Fantasy or Golden Arches, so we ended up doing a site called Stone Henge, which Seru admitted they very rarely dove but were forced to due to the weather conditions. The dive site was pretty miserable as far as coral health was concerned, but we still saw cool, shallow water things we had never seen before. There were a whole bunch of Canary Fangblennies at this dive site, which are cute, and like many South Pacific marine life I noticed, had long trailing tendrils off their tails. We also observed shrimp gobies for the first time. These are gobies that share burrows with tiny shrimp, which I gather help excavate the burrow. It was fascinating to watch this symbiotic pairing in action. it was hard to spot the shrimp because the shrimpgoby did such a good job sounding the alert.
The second dive, Sea Fan Coral, I considered to be fairly average, below average. Even so, I had a spectacularly good time. I was feeling more comfortable than I had all week, in that my buoyancy control and my trim was better, and my mask wasn't giving me issues. The small anthias and dascylluses werent even bothered by my prescence. And so I was just hanging out watching fish behavior, soaking in my last dive in Fiji. I never felt so reluctant to leave a dive site as I did then. I hung off the descent line during my safety stop like Tarzan hanging from a vine. The line kept swinging due to the erratic behavior of the boat in the choppy waves, and the weighted rope nearly hit the coral of the bommie. At one amazing instance, I saw the rope nearly hitting 3 crinoids off a ledge. But I saw these feather stars recover and grab hold of the ledge again. It is hard to believe these feather balls are animals which can crawl and chose where they choose to reside, but yet they are. I continued to hang off the weighted line to make sure the rope did not damage any more coral life by pushing off from the rock until my safety stop was done and I reluctantly boarded the boat.
Dive 181: Stonehenge
Mina: 65', 1:11 min.
Mark: 51', 1:08 min.
Shrimpgobies
Canary Fangblennies
Pennant Bannerfish
Moorish Idols
Longnose Butterflyfish
Regal Angelfish
Dive #182/ Sea Fan Coral
Mina: 59', 1:05 min
Mark: 67', 1:00 min.
Humbug Dascyllus darting around branching coral
Latticed Sandperch
Picasso Triggerfish
Arc-eye Hawkfish
-- Post From My iPhone
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