Camouflage

As the Belle, the Beauty falls in love with the Beast, Heidi Klum was to Seal, Heather Locklear was to David Spade, well, you get the idea. The point is, that these unlikely pairings of beauty and maybe not so beautiful at first glance, brings to mind the saying that beauty is only skin deep. At one's first glance of the Commerson's Frogfish, they appear to be an aberration of God, a mistake, an ugly mistake of God. However when you come to know these creatures and learn a bit about them, you take a liking to and even gain extreme appreciation for their existence. Don't get me wrong, I dig Seal's music, David Spade is always good for a chuckle, and Beauty and the Beast, well, that story just goes along with my point. Which is that underneath it all there is beauty, to someone. 
We dove Mala Ramp today! This is my favorite place to dive on Maui. It was my first dive I took when I moved here, and it caught my heart with it's amazing beauty. Having my son Jaron here for the summer has afforded a dive buddy and more opportunities to dive on my days off. Also along for the dive were some friends of mine. Uncle Mike came out to dive with us this morning. This was a rare treat, because Uncle dives every day for work and it is hard to get up and go dive when you get a rare day off during the busy summer season for our shop. So much mahalos to uncle! Also along for the ride, and the reason we drove over to Lahaina on our day off to go explore this outstanding dive site, was Emily, a research diver that is working on her PhD. Emily doesn't get much free time to dive for fun, due to her busy research schedule, and it was her last day on island for a while. She really wanted to dive Mala Ramp, so we decided to help her, and ourselves to a relaxing, non working dive. Also along on the trip was Mark, a dive instructor who used to dive for the shop, helps Emily out with her research when she is on island.

I have titled this blog Camouflage, and as you look through the pictures they will show you why. First up we had Uncle find the elusive Frog Fish for our photographic opportunity. These fish are one of my favorite to find and to the untrained eye, very hard to find on the reef. I can not take credit for finding these particular froggies. Uncle knows right where these fellows hang out so he can find them a lot more often than I ever could. He found TWO specimens on this dive, both in the same spot, a rare treat. The first is one is yellow and looks a lot like a particular coral that is common here, but this fellow wasn't too difficult to spot. In that picture, you can see his eyes and mouth that distinguish him from the corals on which he is typically hiding. It took me a couple of head shakes to re-focus and find this fellow to shoot him. Kind of embarrassing really, but I wasn't up close when Uncle pointed him out. He then held up two fingers, signaling us that there were two! So it comes my turn to get in to get some shots, and I am there just looking at this area, I see nothing! Finally I was able to see this big yellow fellow! I was getting close to take the shot and then finally out of the corner of my eye caught This orange fellow sitting right there next to my hand as I was looking for a place to grip.
In this picture that I got of him, you can barely make out that this is a fish at all. He really looks like an orange sponge. If you look closely at this shot you can make out part of a fin on the top left of this orange blob. Take a minute to look at it, I will wait. Tough one eh? So yeah! We saw two frog fish in the same spot, just chilling out, waiting for their next meal to come along. These are in the angler fish family, and have a small "lure" on the top of their foreheads that they dangle to attract smaller fish for dinner, lunch, or even an mid day snack. With one big gulp they swallow their prey whole, and both of these appeared to be quite adept at their fishing skills!
From here we continued the journey onward, and several turtles decided to come and hang out with us. I have so many turtle pictures that I took, as one in particular was very curious and even stopped to pose for several minutes with us. Uncle calls this fella "Money" as he is usually very cooperative with us so we can get shots of divers with turtles and make a little beer money on the side!

The turtles are great, but no pictures for this blog. Perhaps I will do a turtle blog, but for now I will continue on with one more camouflage animal that I was able to discover under a chunk of this collapsed concrete pier. The reef sharks tend to hang out under these ledges and swim through areas and as I was under one maneuvering for a shot I noticed this fellow hanging out in a corner. Do you see him? Looks just like a chunk of rock or cement with different sponges growing on it. Now look at this next picture and you can see some of it's legs protruding out from underneath. This is a sponge crab. These things are so fun to watch when they are cruising around at night hunting for their dinner. These crabs get big and they have modified pincers that they use to impale pieces of sponge or really anything that they can attach for camouflaging themselves.
A very interesting creature indeed, inedible however, so no I didn't have myself a nice crab dinner!
So there you have it! One of my favorite things to do during a dive is attempt to find the elusive and hard to find creatures that exist. It makes diving a lot of fun for me. Now I realize that sharks are not masters of camouflage, but shark week is coming so since this dive site is one we call our shark dive, I thought I could end this adventure by posting a couple of pictures of the reef sharks that were out during the dive. This big fellow came pretty close a couple of times and I was feeling my heart race just a bit as he would look at me then sharply turn away. Just to make it even more intriguing and heart racing, there were two of these amazing creatures just cruising back and forth between the parts of the pier giving us several photo op's that I go looking for on a dive!

Just Hangin Around

 Back in the water after two and a half months is a long ass time for a dive professional. I mean come on, I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
To be fair to myself, I did have some rehab going on with my bad back, not to mention I took a trip to the mainland, and all in all it has been "mo bettah for surf" on the island than for diving. But I digress.
At last I am back in the water with my oldest son Jaron, who is here visiting for a few weeks before he heads on his mission for the L.D.S. Church. But this is not about him necessarily, though I do so enjoy diving with all of my children, but he is the only one here with me at the moment, so we went diving down in Makena at a dive site that I particularly enjoy diving called 5 Caves 5 Graves.
There are actually more than 5 caves at this dive site, but there are 5 graves right along the trail that you have to hike down to get to this dive site. I like to tell divers that I take diving at this site that those are the remains of 5 divers that went into one of the caves below and they didn't make it back alive. Tourists will buy anything you are selling, but to all of my tourist friends that may be reading this blog, this doesn't apply to y'all. Ok maybe it did at one time, but I took all of your money to be my friend! Not that I need to pay people to be my friend, because, well hey, I mean come on, I believe I am somewhat likeable after all!
Getting to the title of the blog, Just Hanging Around....Jaron and I hit the mooring for the many snorkel boats that come to this spot to snorkel and decided to take a picture of him swinging on the rope. I thought it was just a fun picture to take.
On our first dive we ran in to a nice female white tip reef shark that happened to be pregnant. This is a very cool thing to see in the wild and I posted a picture of her here, though it is not the best composed picture, you can definitely see her bulging belly. These sharks are very unique amongst sharks as they do not have to constantly swim in order to breath. They can actually pump water over their gills, thus we are able to find them consistently to enjoy and photograph. Gestation period is 10-13 months and it appears this gal is getting up there and ready to have her pup or pups, up to six.

 Below is another pic of a silhouette of her in the cave that I thought was kind of a cool shot to share.
These sharks are not aggressive towards humans, in general they are very docile and trying to sleep during the day, save for the divers that are always seeking them out to sneak a peek and a picture. Now I'm not saying that I am brave enough to back them into their caves trying to get pictures of them, but I have been pretty up close and personal with these sharks, and many of you have seen some of these shots on my Facebook page. I also didn't want to stress her out too much since she was pregnant so once she let me know that she didn't want me bugging her I moved along and let her be.                           

The next picture is of a particularly hard to find, rare, Harlequin Shrimp. There has been a pair of these beautiful little creatures hanging out at a dive site that we use a lot for training new divers.
I was able to spend time with my son while he worked on getting his rescue diver certification with my good friend Uncle Mike Wakashige. For about a year now, these little creatures were hanging out in this particular spot, and I have not been able to go see them in the wild. Day in and day out I have watched new divers come and go that have had the privilege to see these shrimp and today was my turn! I got several pictures and this was a nice shot that I liked. 
Last picture is of a rare Hawaiian Lion Fish. Again thanks to my Uncle Mike for showing this tiny and beautiful specimen. I have had these in captivity before, and they are actually becoming a very invasive species in the Caribbean. They are indigenous to this part of the world and have not over taken the reefs here, in fact quite the opposite. I have seen these fish in the wild twice since I have been here diving and have been lucky to do so.
So after a long hiatus from the ocean, I have once again re-wet my gills and am feeling good about it! Hopefully it won't be another two and a half months before I get to dive again!