Redondo 1/31/13 -- with Mr and Mrs Heater

[YellowEye]

We had a good time diving tonight with the part of Bassman's Crew that weren't lucky enough to make it to Alaska.

We saw more little octos than you can count, stubby squid, snailfish, lumpies, grunt sculpins, dogfish, pipefish, more of those green shrimp -- you name it!

A great time was had by all. And Mr AND Mrs heater were really warming up the tent!



Thanks to Jesse for loaning me his G10!
-Eric

[Dusty2]

Nice work for a borrowed camera!

[Tom Nic]

Mr. AND Mrs. Heater?!?! I'll bet you had to put up the side flaps of the tent!

[Scubak]

Wow!
A Dog Fish!!! How big was it? Where did you see it?
Is the Wolf Eel still around?
I need a night dive there soon!
K

[sitkadiver]

I own a G10 and your pictures are better than mine..... How can that be? HA HA :angry:

Seriously, nice photos.

[LCF]

Wow, a dogfish! I haven't seen one of those in ages.

Love the snail shell curl at the end -- so many beautiful geometries in the things underwater.

[RedmondDiver]

Thanks for letting me tag along with you last night YellowEye. I had a great time. The Lumpies were spectacular. I'm looking forward to diving with you again.

Thanks to Dusty for giving me a good reason to make the trek down to Redondo. The light works very well. It going to get a lot of use.

[YellowEye]

Hi
The dogfish we saw was small, less than a foot long. We saw it on the line at about 65 feet. I've actually seen quite a few dogfish there in the last 6 months ...this was mostly with buddies on rebreathers -- like last night -- but I'm not sure if that makes a difference.

I don't know where the resident wolfeels usually hang out at Redondo, so I can't comment on that.

-Eric

[Scubie Doo]

Looks like the duct tape served you well Eric

Well, I finally got my 5d housing back and the hot shoe seems to be dislodging due to the lack of clearance at the top of the housing. On both dives my strobes were not firing. I spent my time messing around with videos all night, which was a complete pain with the 100mm lens. I finally put together the video, but it is 2.5GB so I can't post it on Vimeo. The macro lens is amazing for video as long as I can maintain focus. However, my depth of view is about 1/16" so even breathing caused it to go out of focus. I did start taking photos to see if I could salvage anything out of 2 hours underwater. I managed to get 1 decent shot. Notice the depth on this. The eye slightly out-of-focus, while the body is in focus and the tail out. Since I did not have strobes, I had to shoot F2.8 - 1/80 - ISO 2000. Anyway, I rigged up a nice foam piece to keep the hot shoe connector in place so next dive, I hope to be shooting again Overall, it was a great night of diving.

Have a great Superbowl weekend everyone!

[Scubie Doo]

Here is one more I found

F2.8 - 1/80 - ISO1000

[Scubie Doo]

I finally figured out how to post the video. Sorry for the camera shake, it was really hard to keep the large rig still. But the stubby squid in the middle of the video is really cool. I had never seen one pile sand on itself like this.

https://vimeo.com/58791001

[mpenders]

Nice, Scubie! I really like the video of the stubby burrowing in.

[Scubie Doo]

Nice, Scubie! I really like the video of the stubby burrowing in.

Thanks Mike. I ha a lot more of that event. But every time I took a breath, the camera moved and I lost focus. Of 40 minutes of total video, I only got 2 decent minutes Although that 5d takes amazing video, I will need to rig up a tripod if I want to get clear, stabilized video. Maybe I will stick to stills.

How you photos turn out?

[dlh]

Thanks to Jesse for loaning me his G10!
-Eric

Oh oh, what happened to your D300?

[mpenders]

Had been a couple weeks since I'd been in the water, and my gills were suffering. A couple of nice dives at The Dond seem to have the ability to cure what ails ya.

As always, Redondo delivered. Numerous small octo's were found, plus about a dozen snailfish, and a large GPO was hanging out under the boat downslope of the pipe. Two different gunnels were found on eggs - one in the engine block south of the boat ramp, and another hidden in a large clam shell. Unfortunately, I had no luck finding any Lumpies, but did locate several Stubbies.

And a few pics:

Red Octo

Crescent Gunnel

Decorated Crab on Opalescent Squid Eggs

Hooded Nudibranch

Showy Snailfish

Great Sculpin

Horned Shrimp

Horned Shrimp. Click on this one and see the hi-res details of it's eye.

Nice to hang out with the South Sound Thursday Crew, and to meet and welcome a potential new Thursday "regular", RedmondDiver!

[Tom Nic]

Great shots Mr. Penders!

Superb macro on that shrimp!

I think your second to the last Sculpin is a Great, not a buffalo. Cool color on him!

[mpenders]

Thanks, Tom! My ID on that one was a bit of an semi-educated guess. I am admittedly not the best at classifying sculpins, and the white coloring didn't help.

[Scubie Doo]

Great shots Mr. Penders!

Superb macro on that shrimp!

I think your second to the last Sculpin is a Great, not a buffalo. Cool color on him!

Agreed, love that shrimp pic!

[LCF]

The white sculpin is COOL!

I keep looking at people's pictures of the horned shrimp and being absolutely sure I've swum over any number of them, thinking they were just debris on the bottom. Shoot, even in the photos, it's sometimes hard to figure out what I am looking at. My hat is off to you guys with the critter eyes!

[YellowEye]

Cool pics/videos Mike and Jesse!

Lynne -- yes, you're likely swimming over the horned shrimp, as I see them quite often, especially at cove 2 and redondo. Look in muddy grey silty boring looking areas, usually 60' or deeper. Look for something small sort of hairball like, just slightly yellower/browner than the mud. We've been seeing a half dozen or so per dive the last couple times we've hit the Redondo bottle field south of the boat ramp.

PS I had to borrow the cam due to strobe issues on my own camera (ongoing issue since this fall!)-- which is hopefully fixed now!