This is a fun thread, although I feel a bit like an impostor posting in the Advanced Scuba Discussions section :looks furtively over shoulder:
I just counted up and.... only 26 dives this year (vs. 64 last year). I don't have any local diving and so most of my dives are made on 2 dive trips per year to Florida where I meet up with a buddy. This year said buddy was not able to make the "holiday" dive trip, hence the much lower dive count this year, and why I'm posting right now instead of diving. :sad:
That said, I did have some fun dives this year. Notably, my buddy and I made our first "independent" wreck dive, and also I did my first ever dive of longer than the usual 50 minutes of a boat dive, which was around 2.5 hours in a spring. Wow, that was great! I think I'm in love with springs
I saw a few new-to-me reef critters in 2011:
- Porcupine fish
- Juvenile Spotted drum (You know how you look in a fish or bird book and see one particular fish/bird that just catches your fancy and you really want to see one but for the longest time you don't? For me this was the Juvenile Spotted drum. I saw lots of different fishes while snorkeling in the tropics prior to learning to dive but never a JSD. Then when I first started diving I had one JSD pointed out to me by a dive guide, but had never found one on my own until this year, when I saw FIVE at different times.) (Still haven't seen the Painted bunting from the bird book
)
- Spotted drum
- Teeny-tiny baby trunkfish (size of fingernail)
- Copper sweepers (may have seen before but not recognized)
- Yellow stingray
- Flatworm (unidentified)
- Arrow crab
- Yellow trumpetfish (not sure if this is a separate type or just a color variation from usual Trumpetfish)
Blue Sparkle