OK, now to day 3! (Whew, I still have 5 days to go! Hope this isn't getting too tedious for anyone.)
Here are some pictures from the third day of diving.
This was to be my last day of diving in Israel proper, and the remaining 5 days were all done by crossing the border on foot to Taba, then taking the Aqua Sport Taba boat to the dive sites further south. Aqua Sport had someone walk you across, so you were not on your own. The border crossing was never a problem. Doing it as a day trip you do not pay border crossing fees, which is very cool! As I've said before, you can shore dive most of the good sites just north of the Sinai border if you plan carefully.
We did two dives by boat, on a site called Japanese Gardens. This is a huge site, and they do it as a deeper dive followed by a shallower dive. The shallow dive has you in as little as 12 fsw, with sand flats and coral islands just covered with life. For the shallow dive we never went deeper than 36 fsw, and spent most of the time in about 15! It was beautiful, and it is so weird to actually take a picture of fish that are casting a SHADOW!
Here's the boat we dove from and some of the shoreline. The boat is a dive rig and a dive rig only!
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We saw these Redback Butterflyfish, Chaetodon paucifasciatus, on almost every dive, but as with many of the fish we see, they are NOT easy to get a picture of. Every aspiring underwater photographer has a huge collection of fish tails... ](*,)
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And speaking of tail shots, these Emperor Angelfish, Pomacanthus imperator, are a great example of a gorgeous fish that is hard to get a picture of! They are shy! I don't think I ever got a good one, but they are a beautiful fish.
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I include this Speckled Sandperch, Parapercis hexopthalma, primarily because it is casting a shadow, one of the things we don't usually get to see here in the PNW! Only a slightly off-kilter coldwater diver like me would get excited about a shadow and dappled light patterns reflected from waves on the surface to the sand!
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One of only about 3 or 4 Nudi's that we saw was this Pyjama Slug, Chromodoris quadricolor. I saw this species of nudi on maybe 3 dives, definitely not lots of them. The PNW sure has more nudi's generally than I saw here!
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It was fun watching these little Bluegreen Puller, Chromis viridis, schooling over a clump of branching coral. If you get close, they immediately dive into the branches of the coral for protection. It was hard for me to get close enough to them to get a good picture of them around the coral!
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Well, I suppose that's enough for now... Hope you're enjoying the pics and dreaming of a warm water trip!
I would have done more of them. ***(OK Tom, Stop, Breathe, Think, then ....)***
Tough job, but somebody's got to do it.
by Unknown
