More Ocean! Cliff notes from Eel Cove

Coral forms in such spectacular ways. Swimming through eel cove looking for eels I spotted this mushroom shaped coral in the distance and just thought it was gorgeous! I'm glad I snapped a picture of it. I mean it's always interesting to see the fish of course and how they interact with you and their own surroundings but sometimes we forget to observe the reef itself as it, too, is a living thing. This is probably one of my favorite pictures of the coral in all it's splendor with the deep ocean as it's backdrop.



These are pictures of (and I had to come home and look them up in my book) orangespine unicornfish. They are so graceful to watch and what is interesting about them is the fact that they have spines or spikes on their tail which can be used in defense. They also can show aggression by changing their body to a darker blue. After learning this I'm going to go back through all of my photos to see if I ever caught a glimpse change without my knowledge.

I think I found one!


During this dive as in many others we always dive deep first and then spend the remaining time in more shallow depths due to air consumption. This time Dennis caught me striking a "Vanna" pose while showing off the deep ocean beyond. Of course every time we started a dive it seemed that Dennis had the camera and so if anything awesome happened to swim by coming up from the depths below he was the photographer at that moment. Here at eel cove we were also lucky enough to see a spotted eagle ray casually swim south past us. I'm glad we were able to see another and catch even better photos.






Did you know that roses grow in the ocean??? Not really we found out later that this is in fact an egg sac and if I have time later I'll look it up again to see exactly what it spawns because right now I haven't got a clue. Dennis asked when we came up from the dive, "What was that red scrunchy thing it looked like a hair scrunchy..." So for now it is the rose red scrunci!
Caught a picture of a cleaner wrasse with a parrot fish. I couldn't believe it they won't stay in one place for me to take a picture of them but they'll stay in one place for these cleaners. I guess it was spa day... Can you believe all the fish? This was a great dive site!!!

Finally, Dennis got pictures of me with some of those pesky raccoon butterfly fish. I was swimming along and they just shuffled in front of me like tour guides! It was really funny.






There will be another posting from this dive site later specifically because of the name. As we were searching for eels here indeed we found plenty but I'd like to post all of the pictures of the variety in one post.