UAE East Coast Temperatures

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Chilly 22C on Friday on Deep Reef 2 and on Car Cemetery 2

Vis was amazing on Deep Reef 2, but critter wise nothing of note apart from this small box fish

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Vis on Car Cemetery 2 was barely 2m though and thankfully Sola lights make it easy to spot your buddy.

Quite a few nudis around .... usual suspects including this rarely spotted Caloria sp. that barely exceeds 10mm

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My buddy Kerstin frequently points to small white dots that I can barely see and usually opt to swing on my +5 dioptre in order to make out what it is.

In this particular case it was a juvenile Gymnodoris sp. perhaps 3mm long.

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My favourite shot of the day though is this Caloria indica

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It seems that a local dive shop which stocks drysuits is now starting to do some really good business this year. My two tech buddies from last week are already moving in that direction. Ernie bought a Waterproof D9 and was doing shallow dives wearing it yesterday and Stephen was messaging me all Friday about buying one.

22C might not seem cold but over the course of a 90 min deco dive, it makes sense to me.
 
Not been online much in the past two weeks due to work mainly, but I have managed a few dives at Cauliflower Gardens, Inchcape 1, Snoopy Deep, Deep Reef and the Ines over the past two weekends.

Weather has been reasonable but water temperatures still remain at 22C. More and more divers I know are moving to drysuits including my daughter who has recently bought a Waterproof D9 through a loan from Bank of Dad.

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Some images from Snoopy Deep (also known by others as Extreme Reef), which is now known by a few dive ops in the Dibba area.

Corals are similar to that found on Deep Reef off Fujairah. Visibility was not particularly good yesterday afternoon, and light was poor. I was shooting WA since we had been on the Ines earlier.

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On the rudder of the Ines

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Ernie on deco

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Manni changes a seal (offering this as a new PADI course :rofl3: )

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Visibility was just disgusting today however the temperature has increased to 23C :D

I shot wide angle on the first dive because we had planned "Operation Cock"

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During the second dive at Car Cemetery 2 I changed over to macro using the 85mm lens as my 60mm lens is buggered after a flood last weekend :banghead:

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Usual suspects of nudibranchs but this Phyllodesmium sp made a nice change from the Phidianas that are prolific on this dive site.

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What can I say, it's still bloody cold at 23C and although I did not do a whole dive (60 mins plus) over the weekend but we were in the water a lot over Friday and Saturday after a whole day of theory on Thursday when I attended an In Water Recompression course run by Don Shirley (IANTD).

My regular buddy Kerstin and I decided to use our 5mm suits but we did get chilly, however from a practical point of view (female toilet routine) it worked out better for Kerstin.

Two days of practical work running various scenarios and using different equipment including Kirby Morgan M48 masks and marked downlines etc., gave us an initial steep learning curve and provided us with plenty of opportunities to "screw up" under a controlled environment.

Fortunately none of us toxed when breathing 100% O2 even after spending 15 mins at 9m before an air break, which proved something positive :D and during my role of "victim" I came ups with 210% CNS and felt none the worse for it.

First scenario had a few mistakes, not least the harness configuration on the line

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Here you can see Daniel attaching the air tank to the manifold (above) then the air tank to the victim (below)

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The manifold is then clipped off to the "victim"

Some of the group of the 15 of us who did the course, Don Shirley in the middle with the hat marked D

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I hope we never have to use IWR, but we do have all the equipment in place as well as the training should we ever have to.
 
Two dives on Deep Reef yesterday with an amazing 15m vis but water still 23C all the way from 28m to surface.

Lots of jellyfish fish around on the deco stop at 6m including this one that reminded me of my dentist

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I had a bit of a scare when a seasnake swam between me and my camera, managed to get a shot of it though when it was swimming off.

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An old fish trap we came across was filled with small glass fish

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We also found a new nudi that we had not seen before Phestilla melanobrachia

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That got Kerstin super excited on the way back

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It's still bloody cold, 24C water temp on first dive at Dibba Rock yesterday with air temps in excess of 34C.

The water was full of wispy white stuff sticking to everything and reducing visibility considerably.

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During the second dive at the south end of Dibba Rock I found a few nudis (C. annulata) and the white stuff wasn't so prolific.

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Dozens of flounders abound, must be mating season as I did see several pairs together.

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Good to meet up with the gang at Freestyle (Darryl, @RainPilot and @ScubaWithTurk) and nice to meet some new people too.
 
Back on the east coast last Friday, for the start of a three day dive weekend.

Diving with Barracuda on Friday morning proved to be a bit of a challenge as they had engine problems, not just getting the damn things started but they lost control of the steering that they eventually fixed using an old coat hanger!

Spending over an hour in sweltering humidity was not good at all and we were almost thinking about abandoning them and heading up north to Sandy Beach and doing a shore dive on Snoopy.

In fact we really wish we had made this choice, as the visibility was shockingly bad deeper than 10m, where a thermocline took the temperature down to 23C, which was fine for the first couple of minutes.

Crocodile fish on Inchcape 10

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There was something weird in the water which I didn't notice at first until I started to photograph this Dendrodoris denisoni

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There were strange particles in the water that I had not seen before, and it was not only really ruining the vis but crating some issues with some of the photos, which can be seen on this shot of a Hypselodoris dolfusi

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The particles appear to be small regular shaped cylindrical shapes and some are like double circular shapes. Later once we were home and cleaned up I was happy to have been using my mask with ear covers as my daughter had lots of this stuff in her ears!

The second dive was on Car Cemetery 2, and the same conditions existed there also. Plenty of nudis around though and I had to be a bit more creative for cleaner shots

Hypselodoris infucata

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Caloria (Phidiana) militaris

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On Saturday I was diving the Ines with some of my tech buddies, four of us on OC and two on CCR.

We hired a a boat through Palm Dive Centre at Dibba, so we had to ride the boat for an hour before arriving at the dive site. The next challenge was finding the mooring line which appeared to be no longer at the surface. We motored around with two people in the water trying to spot the top of the mooring line (a chain with numerous floats) but could not locate it.

Unfortunately our driver did not speak much English, and certainly did not know his left from his right (or his gluteus maximus from his medial epicondyle of the humerus), not to mention reading a GPS.

Then the XR hub boat appeared (from Fujairah) and they more or less stopped spot on my GPS coordinates. They then dropped a diver overboard with a line and they tied onto the top of the mooring.

Our plan was for OC divers first then after 30 mins the two CCR divers.

All four of us were in the water and passing the XR Hub boat as their two CCR divers were still kitting up, and down we went.

As predicted at 10m the water temp plunged from the surface water temp of 33C down to 22C at the bottom (72m).

I was shooting video with my Olympus TG5 in a Nautica Housing and apart from my Sola lights not working it all went well. We got down to the bottom on the port side and underneath the inverted ship then back up to the mooring line which is on the propellor.

No still shots, but I need to see if I can extract something from the video.

Visibility was >30m, but apart from a few barracuda no major animal life.

Dive profile

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One of the CCR divers had an issue with his O2 valve and neither of them dived the wreck. But I was happy to note that the stuff in the water that we had seen on Friday was not around the Ines.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/teric/

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