Roatan - Day 5, continued

"Won't cha take me back down to blennie city"

There were nine of these little fellas in a five inch piece of
encrusted railing on the Prince Albert. The PA is a sunken freighter
right in front of the resort. It is about one-hundred feet long and is
in about sixty-five feet of water. It is covered with a lot of coral
growth and sea life. The blennies can be found just about anywhere
that you care to look on the upper parts of the ship.

Roatan - Day 5, continued

Peek-a-boo!

Roatan - Day 5, continued

Even better, several eel photos. This spotted eel is getting his chin
tickled by a yellowline arrow crab.

Roatan - Day 5

Another day, another four dives!

No tropical dive photolog would be complete without an eel photo.

Roatan - Day 4, continued

Tonight, some local children came to the resort to perform traditional
Honduran dances. Besides performing for tourists (which helps raise
money for the program), they also compete against other dance groups.
Honduran children are very good looking.

Roatan - Day 4, continued

Hummingbirds are very numerous around the reset. There were ten of
them fighting over two feeders.

Roatan - Day 4

This is a squirrel fish. You might remember them from my last Maui
posts. He wasn't doing anything special, but I like the look on his
face.

Roatan - Day 3, continued

A busy reef scene with a variety of coral and fish.

Roatan - Day 3, continued

We spent the surface interval (the rest period between dives) at a
shallow spot between two small cays (islands). There were some
mangrove trees along the shore. I made this wide-angle over/under shot
using my 8 inch dome. This is one of the things that you can only do
with an SLR and not with a compact camera. You can see the mangrove
trees on top and a school of small fish below. It is impossible to get
both in focus without a special half filter. Still, I'm happy with
with the results.

Roatan - Day 3

Although this photo is from Tuesday, today is actually Saturday and we
are waiting for our transportation to the airport. I dove four dives
on most days, each an hour long, for a total of twenty dives. That's
half if a work week that I spent underwater. Its amazing how tiring
that can be. I haven't really had much time (or energy) to post photos.

Speaking of work, Melodie found me a t-shirt that says "Get a job...or
dive. You chose!" It seemed very appropriate considering my
unemployed status. If it wasn't for obligations in Temecula, I would
probably choose to dive and travel the world for a year.

The bar/dining room has wifi so it is easy to check email on my
iPhone. I'm sending these posts from my iPhone. It looks like the
formatting is a little off, so I'll have to fix it later.

Below is a head-on shot of a peacock flounder. They are really good at
blending into the sand, but not as good when they are on the rocks and
coral. You can see his protruding eyes. One of the divers kicked him
with her fins, chasing him off. I imagined him exclaiming "Oh my
protruding eyeballs!" as he swam away.

Roatan - Day 2, continued

Sea horses are one of the favorite things to see here. They come in
all kinds of colors and are difficult to find, even if you know where
to look. This is the only one that we have seen so far.

Roatan - Day 2, continued

I've been working on my wide angle skills, particularly in getting the
bottom side of the water surface to look nice. This is one of my best
shots so far.

Roatan - Day 2, continued

Divers on the reef! Most of the diving is wall diving which means
that we dive along vertical coral walls that go down to over 100 feet.
Usually, we go along at about 60-70 feet until we use half of a tank
and then we come back across the top which is usually 30-40 feet deep.

Roatan - Day 2

I seem to be on a shrimp theme. Here are a couple more banded coral
shrimp in a tube sponge.

Roatan - Day 1, continued

Here is another kind of shrimp - a Pederson's Cleaner Shrimp. I saw
the shrimp cleaning a fish. After the fish spooked, I stuck in a
finger and got my cuticles trimmed (seriously - but I couldn't take a
one handed photo of the manicure). If you look really closely, you
might see some eggs in it's transparent abdomen.

Roatan - Day 1

The Temecula Valley Dive Club is in Roatan, Honduras, for our summer
trip. We have 41 people here - 40 divers and 1 non-diver. Melodie, the
non-diver is enjoying some down time after our three week European
tour, which ended just 8 days before this trip (thank you Guidant!).
The diving is good, as usual. The Nikon D-80 is behaving well and I'm
happy to own a second DS-125 strobe. This first shot is of a banded
coral shrimp in a big barrel sponge. The shrimp hide in the crevices.
It is easiest to find them
By noticing their long white antennae sticking out of the sides of the
sponge. This one was actually on the bottom side of a sponge. You can
see a few of my air bubbles that were trapped.