Diving the Red Sea

The first day of diving was basically just check-out stuff and was somewhat disappointing. Sure we saw Lionfish and some cool things but the visibility was quite poor. The situation improved the 2nd day when we dove the pinnacles offshore.

The visibility and weather slowly improved throughout the week so by the end the visibility was consistently pretty good and the waves were way down. We saw Lionfish on almost every dive and on one night dive we couldn't get rid of them. They seemed to get attracted by our lights so when we're trying to look at or take a picture of something else a Lionfish or two would swim by to see what we're looking at, probably to see if it was tasty.

Melanie complained that we didn't see the bright colorful soft corals that are always shown in books and dive magazines when they show pictures of diving in the Red Sea. We saw the red soft coral only a couple times but there was only one dive site that had a lot of it.

Although there were Zodiacs to bring us to dive sites, we rarely used them. The dive sites all had mooring lines already in place that were right at the dive site so most of the time we just did a giant stride off the back of the boat. The few times we did use the Zodiacs were at sites with some current or when the boat couldn't get close enough to the site. In those cases we rolled off the back and were quickly picked up by the crew after the dive.

My photography dramatically improved on this dive with some tips from Foad. He shoots with a similar Canon point and shoot camera to mine and encouraged me to ditch the big strobe and just use the built-in flash and the Canon case's diffuser and just focus on macro photography. There aren't too many big fish in the Red Sea anyway. That worked well since the fish seemed to be much less scared off by the small housed camera then by the camera with big strobe. The smaller camera also allowed me to get closer to the subject and even be able to get more into crevices to get a shot of some tiny little critter.

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Video Available:

	Short clip of four dolphins at the beginning of a dive. If you look carefully near the end of the clip the dolphins passed within a few feet of two other divers who said they never saw them. (38 seconds)
	Video clip of me playing with a Napoleon Wrasse. I was just rubbing my fingers together which seemed to get his interest. He wasn't really buying it but kept looking back to check. In the end some loud noise startled him and he swam away. (1 minute 24 seconds)

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Mystery Critters

Despite having a couple fish identification books on board we still couldn't quite identify everything. Below are some of the weirdest of the animals we saw that we couldn't find in any of our books.

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