On Thursday, Dave (the group leader) arranged to do three dives as opposed to the regular one boat dive site, one drop off dive and another boat dive. That day we did 3 boat dives to three different sites in a row. The dive sites were: Calvin's Crack, 40ft Point and Golden Chain. As this was not part of the regular package, we gave the captain and the divemaster a little bit extra tip.
40-ft Point
40ft Point was the second morning dive of the day. The site was located just in front of Fantasy Island, right next to CocoView. It turned out to be one of the best dives of the trip. The site was abundant of fish and creatures. On the way to the bottom, we saw a school of Atlantic spadefish in a cool formation.
Atlantic Spadefish
We also saw a green moray eel, Nassau groupers, black groupers and lots of chubs and jacks. I was saying to myself, why we waited until the end of the trip to go to one of the best sites so far and it was really close to CocoView as well. The dive got even better when the divemaster Mel found a yellow sea horse on the reef wall.
Yellow Seahorse on Branch
This was the first time I had seen a yellow sea horse. I have seen red ones before. I got so excited that I committed the crime of hogging the time with the sea horse. Part of my problem was that I was not having good results with my camera. The strobe was not firing correctly, the pictures were coming up too dark and they were out of focus.
Yellow Seahorse curled on Coral
I later learned my lesson to set the sensitivity to ISO 100 or higher, and perhaps use manual focus. If I had my settings ready, I wouldn't have hog the time with the sea horse too much. When we go back to the boat I was guilty as charged for hogging the time with the sea horse.
Golden Chain
After lunch, our next boat dive was to Golden Chain. A shallow dive site with a sea bed full of staghorn coral. I had never seen something like it at other places in the Caribbean. It was really a forest of staghorn of coral, the same type of coral all over.
Staghorn Coral Forest
CocoView Happy Hour
That night we relaxed a bit and decided not do a night dive. Also, we wanted to celebrate Dave's 700th dive with a dawn dive the next morning. We spent the night at the outdoors dining area right next to the bar.
Fantastic Endeavors Group at Happy Hour. Front row, left to right: Carol, Chris, Christina and Craig. Standing up from left to right: Cindy, Dave, Eddy and Dina
This is a night picture of the main building at CocoView. The left side is where the outdoors dining area is, conveniently located next to the bar.
CocoView Bar at Night
That night we headed to bed relatively early, as we had planned to meet at 6:00am for Dave's 700th dawn dive.
Last Day of Diving and Last Good Picture
On Friday, our last day of diving we woke up to meet at the dive lockers at 6:00am for our only dawn dive of the trip. I had never done a dawn dive before, mainly because it was hard to wake up and even harder to make a dive buddy wake up. This group, on the other hand, was very motivated. It has been one of the best groups I've dived with.
That morning we did Newman's Wall. I was still having problems with my camera as the pictures were coming dark and the strobe was not firing. Afterwards, I had concluded that there were several factors that contributed to my not getting good pictures in this trip:
- TTL connector got flooded (on the camera side). One of the pins got corroded and was making a bad connection. This caused the strobe to not fire.
- Used new rechargeable batteries that were not "broken in". This caused the strobe to stop working after a few shots and make the camera believe it had no strobe, thus firing its internal flash.
- My Mode #1 was set with a film sensitivity of ISO 50, only able to detect very strong lighting. This was causing my pictures to come out dark.
After the dawn dive, we had breakfast and was ready to "start" the regular day. However, Dave, again, arranged for us to stray away from the ordinary. Intead of doing one boat dive and a drop-off dive, we did two boat dives: one at French Bay Cut and another at Menagerie.
At French Bay, I managed to get this picture of a gray angel fish munching on the coral. Again I was still having problems with my camera, but this one was the exception. The strobe fired correctly and the exposure was right.
Grey Angelfish munching on Coral
The dive site was pretty good. There was a lot of fish following us. For a change Captain Osman went diving with us instead of our DM Mel. There was a reason the fish was following us, Osman was feeding them bread.
Our last dive of the trip was at a site called Menagerie. This site was really good as well. I saw more than one spotted drum fish. However none of my pictures came out well. We also saw Nassau groupers, schools of chubs and jacks, and big mutton snapper that was following us towards the end of the dive. Again Capt. Osman was feeding the fish and looked like a bait ball. I also experimented a bit and brought a piece of bread. The fish started to "attack" me, so I had to cover myself with my camera and two arms, it made it a fun last dive though.