We dive pretty much every weekend, and this weekend we headed out to do a dive that we may have done 100 times before - swimming out along the coral "finger" that runs due East of Charco del Palo.
The usual suspects were along for the trip, Crisis Chris, Medical Mick, Bilious Brian, Shivering Steve, Mark the accountant and yours truly. We'd decided to follow the finger at 15 Meters depth, so that when we reached the big drop off, we could get maximum time as we went deep.
The swim out was uneventful, although I did peer into a couple of caves to check out the C Lite 8 I was testing - see below for a link to that article. We did spot a couple of small grouper and a big shoal of sardines.
As we descended in flying formation to the end of the finger we all spotted what we first thought was a turtle on it's side, but as we got closer, we realized it was a Sunfish. It was still for some time and we managed to get within about ten meters of it, which is unusual for what is a notoriously shy creature. This particular one might have been somewhere between 2 and 2.5 meters in diameter, and was at a depth of around 47 meters.
To give you an idea of how rare a siting this was, in our group of divers, with more than 5000 dives between us, there had only ever been two previous sitings - one from me in Gibraltar and one from Brian in UK more than 20 years ago!
It was delightful experience, and one we talked about for some time afterwards. Sadly none of us had a camera, but you can see an excellent photo at this site.
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Scuba Mike's Red Sea Trip - Part Four
Submitted by Scuba Mike on Thu, 05/02/2009 - 19:16.The first dive that morning was to be on the Rosalie Moller. This was to be a deep dive, so we switched to a lean 28% nitrox mix, to avoid any oxygen toxicity. I sensed at the briefing that something was wrong - we were told to stay with the guides at all times and not to enter deco. Some of us were a little annoyed about this - at the time I was one of the less experienced divers, and I had over 200 dives to my credit, with well over half of those at 30 meters or more! Deco diving is something I do most weeks, so we knew already that this was going to be a short dive.
Ikelite C Lite 8 Dive Lamp - Review
Submitted by Scuba Mike on Mon, 09/02/2009 - 16:44.
I tested one of these lamps over the weekend, and I surfaced impressed. The C Lite 8 is a good value for money lamp - here in Europe it's priced at €99 and most US sites seem to sell it for around $100. That's the price of the lamp itself, although you can buy it with a nifty little backup lamp, which is much smaller, for another €30.
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