Fairy Bower

• Fairy Bower
• JCJ
• 20 degrees, flat and 15m blue vis. Lovely
• 3mm wetsuit
• Low tide +1hr in at 11:30
• Camera test dive

After the near dive miss with the tank we eventually entered the water at 11:30ish. Clear, blue and warm. Lovely. The main purpose of this dive was to test the integrity of camera housings, me my plastic box for the point and press, JCJ with his altogether chunkier and more pro aluminium housings. As my investment in underwater phot gear is relatively light I decided to put my camera in the housing. JCJ chose not and therefore spent the dive towing around his unusually bouyant empty metal boxes.

And so to the dive. As a brief summary - lots of fish, fewer sharks than before. We saw a giant cuttlefish, a large school of yellowtail -make that very large - a couple of kingfish looking a bit thugish and menacing. There were stripey, old wives, a scorpionfish, a couple of not especially friendly grouper and most of the usual suspects. I saw, briefly, three sharks. The sun shining through the water was fabulous and it was a very nice place to be. Duller stuff: I managed to get some condensation into the lens port and so my pics, iffy at best, were almost uniformly awful. The main cause of the awfulness was my having forgotten how to adjust my strobe and instead of stopping, taking the same shot a few times to set myself up correctly I kept moving around, taking differetn shots and learning nothing other than I'm an idiot. Any my long hose was pissing me off; it does not stay neatly tucked under my knife, comes out from its place stuffed in my harness and does not have the cannister light to loop under - the thing I know works. But these are petty gripes and overall the dive was lovely.