Where did I go with my force fins?

[Soakedlontra]

Giant Pacific Octopus Saturday Night Show on December 1st

On December 1st I had the amazing chance to see two large giant Pacific octopuses out in the open in the same spot at Cove 2, West Seattle. My buddy and I did two night dives at this popular dive site. Strangely enough, during the first dive just one instructor and his students were in the water and during the second we were alone. Usually, Cove 2 is packed with divers at weekends. We did not see the second octopus until we were half way through with our second dive. I guess we must have been under the effects of a common underwater condition called "scuba blindness". The two animals were facing each other separated by a physical barrier. It looked like a pile of rocks with a concrete slabs jammed in the middle of it. When we spotted the first octopus we thought that it was trying to pull out from a hole a crab to eat. Bu when we saw the second octopus we figured that the first animal was a female and the second a male and they were having a romantic encounter.

Since that day I have been trying to confirm that what we saw was indeed two octopuses mating. A couple of weeks later we dived at the same site and searched for the same spot to see if under that pile of rocks there was a den with a female inside. Unfortunately we did not think about marking the area so it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Disappointingly we did not find it and did not see any octopuses either. After writing to a couple of GPO experts, I was not able to solve this mystery. However I have been thinking about it and reached the conclusion that it is more likely that those two octopuses were both males and that they were interested in a female that was inside a den that we were not able to see because the males large bodies were obtruding the view.

 

[Soakedlontra]

On December 1st I had the amazing chance to see two large giant Pacific octopuses out in the open in the same spot at Cove 2, West Seattle. My buddy and I did two night dives at this popular dive site. Strangely enough, during the first dive just one instructor and his students were in the water and during the second we were all by ourselves. Usually, Cove 2 is packed with divers at weekends. We did not see the second octopus until we were half way through with our second dive. I guess we must have been under the effects of a common underwater condition called "scuba blindness". The two animals were facing each other separated by a physical barrier. It looked like a pile of rocks with a concrete slabs jammed in the middle of it. When we spotted the first octopus we thought that it was trying to pull out from a hole a crab to eat. Bu when we saw the second octopus we figured that the first animal was a female and the second a male and they were having a romantic encounter.

Since that day I have been trying to confirm that what we saw was indeed two octopuses mating. A couple of weeks later we dived at the same site and searched for the same spot to see if under that pile of rocks there was a den with a female inside. Unfortunately we did not think about marking the area so it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Disappointingly we did not find it. After writing to a couple of GPO experts, I was not able to solve this mystery. However I have been thinking about it and reached the conclusion that it is more likely that those two octopuses were both males and that they were interested in a female that was inside a den that we were not able to see because the males large bodies were obtruding the view.


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How can I get rid of the unnecessary attachment at the end of the post? I tried to click on it but there isn't an option to delete it. Hold on!, Do you see it in your screen at all? ...Strange I don't see it here but in my original post is still there!

 

[Soakedlontra]

Diving at Langley Marina until I can

Langley Marina is one of the most popular dive sites on Whidbey Island. A lot of dive shops bring their students here to do their open water dives. It's a shallow dive, full of critters to see and sheltered from the prevailing winds. The Port of South Whidbey has decided to expand the marina to accommodate larger boats. Apparently the construction works will start next summer and the site will be closed for diving. Who knows if there will be access to the tire reef again once the expansion has been completed! In the meantime let's keep enjoying this site that's special day and night until we can!



It's a real frustrating challenge to take underwater pictures with a wide angle lens in these greed and often cloudy waters. The visibility can range from 25/30 ft to unbelievably awful!
Today we are lucky, it's not too bad!





(Day hopping December 8, 2012)











The tires that form the artificial reef at Langley Marine were part of a floating dock that collapsed. So they are spread all over the place at the bottom of the marina. They create perfect hiding places for a lot of species of fish. One of them is the Red Irish Lord. This one in particular is guarding eggs. It was the first that I saw RIL's eggs. I was lucky that the female did not lay the eggs further inside the 'jungle' of tires. ​

 

[Soakedlontra]

jeez this thread is so long that it took me 30 minutes to find this post! An index would be handy...
So I have just resurrected from the 'dead'. Still, I refrain myself from diving until the end of this week.
Anyway, the reason for resurrecting is to let you know that the Canadian marine naturalist, diver and author Andy Lamb has identified this cute rockfish!
Follow this link for more details:

Water Bubbles: Out of Its Depth by Andy Lamb




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I am very pleased to announce that the University of California Press has published a different picture of the Redstripe Rockfish (Sebastes proriger) in the book titled "A Guide To The Rockfishes, Thornyheads and Scorpionfishes of the Northeast Pacific" by John L. Butler, Milton S. Love and Tom E. Laidig.
For more info go to:

A Guide to the Rockfishes, Thornyheads, and Scorpionfishes of the Northeast Pacific - John L. Butler, Milton S. Love, and Tom E. Laidig - University of California Press

It's a really cool ID book that describes each fish more with images than text.

I want to thank my buddy Sam who agreed to go back the following day to the site where I first spotted this uncommon fish so I could take more pictures. We got really lucky. The Redstripe was still hanging around where we saw it the previous day (unlike the two GPOs at Cove 2)​

 

[Bob Evans]

Wonderful news, Dr. Milton love is a good friend and I have provided him years ago with several rockfish photo's also...but not in a book!!!!

 

[Soakedlontra]

Wonderful news, Dr. Milton love is a good friend and I have provided him years ago with several rockfish photo's also...but not in a book!!!!

Beside being a knowledgeable and dedicated ichthyologist, he seems to be a good sport too! He may have had a chuckle when I told him that as soon I as I got his previous book "Certainly More Then You Want to Know About The Fishes of The Pacific Coast A Postmodern Experience" I placed it on the scale that I have in my bathroom. His beefy volume turned out to weigh 5lbs! So now I have to reinforce my bookshelf...

 

[Soakedlontra]

Last 2012 Dive: The Brown Rockfish and the Red Brotula

After several weeks of rough weather, last Sunday the sea chilled out and the clouds dried up at last! My buddy and I did a couple of wall dives at the southern tip of Whidbey Island. There was some surface current but it was not a big deal to swiftly swim out, reach the edge of the clay wall and drop down to 30 feet and beyond where the current died out. We hadn't done a deep dive in months so we took advantage of those good conditions to reach a depth of 100 ft during our first dive. The visibility was an average 15/20 feet.

On the second dive we dropped to 60 feet to hang around with a variety of different kind of fish and critters that were crawling all over the wall’s malleable surface or hiding inside its numerous cracks and holes. The Rockfish and Red Irish Lords were particularly photogenic.


At some point I noticed a mature brown Rockfish that was resting at the entrance of an opening on the wall under an overhang. When I started to take pictures the fish would patiently tolerate the light of my strobe for a while, then briskly swim away and then come back to rest in front of the same hole. The fish definitively claimed it as its home. We played this kind of game of ‘posing-for-pictures-and-running-away’ several times, until I noticed that something bright red was moving in the deepest recesses of that crack when the Rockfish was not around and did not obstruct the view with its tan body.


After pointing my dive light several times at that narrow aperture I was able to see the head of a Red Brotula. It was moving backward and forward like a horizontal yo-yo. The Red Brotula is a secretive stubby eel-like fish that it’s hard to see because of its habit of hiding inside holes and its extremely shy personality. I may have seen this fish once before during a night dive in much shallower waters but none at this dive site until now.

I decided to try to take a picture of this uncommon fish but it turned out to be an impossible task. The hole was pretty small and I could not fit the camera and strobe inside it, then as soon as the light was too intense the Red Brotula was retreating behind a kind of ‘partition wall’, which was standing inside the hole to the right. Furthermore I had to put up with the brown Rockfish too. It would keep resting in front of that exact hole and not any others (there were many to choose from) and even trying to squeeze its large body inside it. To begin with it was rather amusing to witness the Rockfish’s stubbornness, but after a while it became a bit painful to watch its unsuccessful attempts to hide its whole body inside that crack.



I don’t remember for how long I hovered in front of that hole while my buddy was uncomplainingly waiting for me to be through with shooting and while other Rockfishes were swimming around me totally oblivious of what was going on. Eventually I got tired of playing hide-and-seek with the Red Brotula and gave in. We moved on to explore a couple of more ledges and then slowly ascend to finish off our dive with a safety stop at 15 ft.

At the surface sunlight and a blue sky greeted us for a change.


Our bodies were a bit stiff from the cold water. The temperature had dropped down to 48°F. However, one thing was sure, even if I hadn't been able to take a snapshot of that Red Brotula I will always vividly remember its dark eye and red skin appearing and disappearing inside a narrow home that it shared with such a peculiar brown Rockfish.



I wish you a Fantastic Bubbling Happy New Year!​

 

[Soakedlontra]

Diving into my 400th dive. Part one: At the Wreck of the Ranger with Sambolino44

Last Saturday it was a crispy, clear, sunny but cooler day in Port Townsend, WA. Sambolino44 and I showed up at the Octopus Gardens dive shop convinced that we would hook up with other divers for a shop diving day. It turned out that I had made a mistake: nobody was scheduled to show up there because I got the date wrong. The folks who run Octopus Gardens were celebrating the actor Lloyd Bridges' birthday by showing one of the episodes of Sea Hunt on a flat screen, instead.

So my buddy and I braved the below freezing air and went diving at the wreck of the Ranger rather than drinking hot chocolate and watching the TV show. The sky hadn't been so clear and bright in weeks and I was hoping that the water would have been the same because I wanted to take some wide angle shots of the bow and stern with Sambolilno44 posing as a model. When we surface-swam to the piling that was our point of descent, the water looked really gorgeous.


(http://rawbubbles.blogspot.com/2013/01/day-hopping-january-12-2013.html)

Unfortunately below the surface it was very disappointing. The visibility was less than 10 ft. I had to swallow my frustration while thinking that I had the wrong lens and port, which were not very suitable for macro photography.

Last October I dove at the Ranger for the first time. The worn out wooden hull was covered with Giant Red Dendronotids (see post #399). I wondered if it would have been the case this time too. Instead, the first things to appear in the murky water were hundreds of bright white egg ribbons. I thought that those Red Giant Dendronotids had been busy in laying those eggs. However it was only when I hovered less than one foot from the hull that I was able to see the animals that were responsible for decorating the wreck in such a fashion: the inconspicuous and not very photogenic Barnacle Nudibranchs. I had never seen such a high concentration of these small sea slugs in one location before.


Eventually, some Red Giant Dendronotids appeared at the opposite side of the wreck. They were busy laying eggs too.



While these sea slugs were on a reproduction spree, other species of nudibranch were crawling all over the place: a Monterey Sea Lemon, a beautiful Golden Dirona and a countless number of Red Flabellina, an aeolid that I have never seen before.



Some fish would venture outside the hole-ridden belly of the Ranger. They were large striped perch and juvenile rockfish; a bright red Vermilion was among them. Next to the bottom of the hull there were several piles of empty crab and clam shells. Immediately I thought that a Giant Pacific Octopus with a bottomless appetite must have claimed the Ranger as its home.


The GPOs that I had seen living in wrecks had their dens underneath them. The den of this particular animal must have been inside the small ship itself. We inspected all the holes and cracks in the wood but could not see even half sucker or the tip of one of its arms. The Ranger is not a large vessel and divers cannot penetrate it. The holes are not wide enough and, beside, even with the proper training and enough room, who would want to swim inside a wreck whose wood is completely rotting away?
The fact that I could not see what was really lurking inside the Ranger filled my mind with a sense of mystery and wonder. While I was swimming back to the beach after our second dive there was no doubt in my mind that I would be back to this little shallow wreck soon.



​

 

[Soakedlontra]

Diving into my 400th dive. Part two: Lingcod Dance with TSandM

On Sunday, January 13, it was still sunny and cold. I got up at 6 am and drove to Edmonds Underwater Park to meet my buddy TSandM. It was really nice to meet up with her since the days I was a new certified diver. My goal was to take pictures of a cabezon. My buddy was happy to shoot whatever interesting marine animals we would encounter along our watery path.

​

The park encompasses a rather large area next to a ferry terminal with a sandy bottom of around 30 to 40 ft, so to create a habitat for a greater number of animals, the founder of the park, Bruce Higgins, built an artificial reef made of pipes, sunken vessels and other man-made structures. Despite its shallowness, this site is always full of those critters that like to live in protected waters without strong currents. It is also the only place in Puget Sound where, as far as I know, cabezon are abundant.

Diving with TSandM was relaxing and fun because we have a similar diving style and were on the same page. As photographers, we were able to work as a team even if we were both busy messing with the camera settings and composing pictures. If we spotted something interesting to see we would signal to each other and take turns to photograph it. We reached different sections of the artificial reef at 20 ft and did not swim any further because there were so many critters that could have engaged us for hours.


​

While swimming slowly to the reef I kept looking at any structures that stood from the bottom eager to see a cabezon. But, how often happens in scuba diving, the excitement fueled by high expectations can turn rapidly into bitter disappointment. There were no cabezon to be found at all where we were. Instead, several lingcod came into view and my first thought was:”Oh dear, I see this fish all the time at Keystone!”

After a little while, I shook off my frustration and began to approach one lingcod as slowly as I could in the attempt to make the fish get used to my presence without freaking it out. I had no clue of what was laying nearby, though. It was my buddy who pointed out to me the large egg mass that the fish was guarding. Papa lingcod was not very happy to have me around and swam straight toward me several times, but overall, managed to tolerate me without becoming too aggressive.




Later, I tried to take a picture of another lingcod that was guarding eggs too. This fish had a different personality, though. He kept swimming resolutely and with determination toward me even if I thought I was not that close to his eggs. While I was trying to shoot a dramatic portrait of the fish, he began to swim around me like a shark. Certainly, I didn't expect that kind of behavior from a lingcod. I felt quite vulnerable and began to turn my body as fast as I could so I could keep an eye on the fish. I was concerned that the lingcod had the plan to bite me from behind when I was not looking.




While the fish and I were ‘dancing’ a kind of underwater waltz, TSandM stopped taking pictures and calmly watched us, not sure whether with amusement or unease. After several pirouettes with the lingcod, it seemed to me that instead of being in a ball room, I was inside the ring of a circus. And guess who was the tamer, and who was the wild animal?

Eventually, I realized that the two of us could not keep circling forever. Somehow, I managed to back off a little further away from the eggs. That seemed to calm down the fish because he finally decided to stop swimming to rest on the bottom. I quickly snatched the opportunity to swiftly swim away from his sight. I was glad to end my 399th dive without having to bear the marks of the lingcod’s teeth in my rear.

During my 400th dive I had a more relaxing interaction with mellow copper rockfish while TSandM focused her attention to different species of nudibranchs that kept showing up at every corner. I am certainly glad that my buddy, despite her extensive diving experience at depths beyond recreational limits, still enjoys diving at easy sites in 20 ft of water. As for the lingcod, I will never forget his dedicated paternal, yet menacing, stare and I wish him the best of luck for a successful egg-hatching.








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[TSandM]

It was a fun dive! And I have never lost my joy in doing shallow dives (in fact, I often prefer them) so long as there are critters to see!

I can't recall ever hearing a story of anyone actually being bitten by a ling. I have heard plenty of those stories about cabezons, and have personally seen two incidents, one of them involving me. The ling who was chasing you was by far and away the most aggressive individual I've ever seen, though. I think his "territory" was at least 50 feet in diameter, which is actually rather foolish, since while he was chasing us, somebody else was probably nibbling on the egg mass