Tag Archive: Nudibranch


Last Dive of the Year, at The Cut.

Filed Under: Whytecliff by Roko — Comments Off on Last Dive of the Year, at The Cut.
December 29, 2013
Puget Sound King Crab

A Small Puget Sound King Crab

After a thwarted dive at Britannia Beach in the morning, I made my way down to Whytecliff Park where Paul and Steve were waiting for me to join them on a dive.

We hopped into the cut for a nice dive. Although it was a bit chilly on the surface, it warmed up a bit once we got below the thermocline. The visibility was amazing by Vancouver standards, and I managed to spot a really good diverse number of critters. Unfortunately I didn’t get any shots I love this time out, but I got some good shots of the different critters I saw.

I’m begining to think my perceived decrease in good photos is being caused by getting too close to the subject. I used to zoom in somewhat, and take photos from futher back, casting smoother lighting with my single strong. I think by getting too close it’s making the lighting too sharp. A second strobe to even things out sure would be nice..

Grunt Sculpin

A Grunt Sculpin…

One of the critters was another Grunt Sculpin, which I managed to get some half-decent shots of. One of my favorite local species, and I always struggle to get decent photos. One of the reasons is that I usually see then on a bottom covered in shells, which is really hard to properly expose with the highly-reflective whites. They also don’t like to properly pose, always hopping about on the bottom when you get close…

Plenty of different crabs as well, as evidenced in the top photo, and all the photos in the gallery below.

Not too much else to say about this dive, it was a good way to end off the diving year. Now for a work-induced dry spell, and then back at it again!

The rest of the photos are below:

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Return to Furry Creek

Filed Under: Furry Creek by Roko — 1 Comment
November 17, 2013
Crimson Anemone

A Crimson Anemone. Note the translucent tentacles with green tips.

30-Nov-13: I’ve improved upon the colours in some of these photos after messing around with the RAW files, and added some new ones. More info below.*

Armed with brand new batteries in my strobe, we hooked up to Furry Creek for a couple of dives. I haven’t dove Furry Creek in over a year, but it was nice to get back to one of my local favourite spots. Thankfully, we were treated with perfect surface conditions, a high slack tide and amazing visibility (for Vancouver, at least).

Having proper batteries in my strobe helped a lot, and I took a lot of photos, many of which were interesting subjects and some that turned out very nicely. Of particular treat was a juvenile GPO which I spotted popping it’s head out from it’s den. Even tucked away in his den, it made an amazing photo subject that was slowly started inching out towards us. A special thanks goes to my dive buddies, putting up with me obsessing over getting photos of this guy!

Octopus

A little octopus.

Other treats were some really interesting Crimson Anemones, with a light pinkish hue and green-tipped tentacles. I got in close for a couple photos, which turned out amazingly well – A lot of details on these anemones.

In the rocky area in the cove were plenty of large sculpins, including a Buffalo Sculpin guarding an egg mass. I struggle at identifying sculpins, as they all look the same to me, but I took a shot at trying to identify some of the different ones I saw.

Interestingly, there were a couple of piles of starfish goo. I also found a few starfish arms scattered around, but I’m unsure if they were related to the starfish wasting syndrome, or a starfish that fell victim to another animal.

Red Irish Lord and Egg Mass

Red Irish Lord guarding an egg mass.

I think I’ve set a record for myself, with 37 photos I considered bloggable. Although many of the photos aren’t the best in terms of focus, composition, exposure, etc, I thought they all showed interesting subjects that I wanted to remember down the road.

*30-Nov-13: After messing around with RAW files in Darktable for the past little while, I’ve come to thoroughly appreciate the in-camera JPEG processing that my camera does. For the most part, I’ve been having trouble getting the RAW photos looking as nice as the JPEGs, especially with the rich reds that Canon cameras add — Very noticeable with the dull colours and lack of contras. 

I’m sure there’s a way to replicate the in-camera processing in Darktable, but I haven’t cracked that nut yet. For the most part, I’ve decided to switch back to just touching up the JPEGs for most of my photos, unless they need more correction than the JPEG files will allows. Interestingly, JPEGs allow a lot of flexibility for decently exposed shots.  I’ve gone ahead and tweaked the JPEGs from this dive, and replaced some of the more interesting pictures I’d previously posted. 

Without further adoo, the rest of the photos are below.

 

 

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Octopus at Whytecliff

Filed Under: Whytecliff by Roko — Comments Off on Octopus at Whytecliff
October 27, 2013
Juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus

Juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus and Friend

30-Nov-13: I’m part way through re-editing some of these photos to improve the colours and contrast. 

Every time I step away from diving for a while, I need the first part of a dive to shake out both my dive skills, as well as my photography skills. So, after having spent a month out of the water due to a busy work scheduled (which seemed much longer than a month!), I was excited to get back into the water and getting back into the groove. As luck would have it, the first warm-up photos I took were of an Octopus, out in the middle of the bay at Whytecliff!

Juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus

Having had enough of my shenanigans, the Octopus is trying to blend in with some seaweed.

This little guy was definitely a treat to see as we were starting our dive. I initially thought (and posted) that it was a Red Octopus, but due to the lack of distinct papillae, it may acrually have been a juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus — I’m not entirely sure. With a bit of excessive finning and fiddling with camera settings (Definitely wasn’t in the zone at the start of the dive at that point), I managed to snap some photos. In retrospect, I have a list of different settings I would have liked to tried, but the photos turned out well regardless.

The cool thing about this little guy was how he was changing his colour and texture to blend in with the background a bit better. As I snapped a batch of photos, it started to wrap itself in seaweed to hide better, and we decided to leave him/her alone and carry on with our dive.

The rest of the dive was fun, but eventually I found myself drawn back to the Octo. We got back up to the depth where we hit the wall face, and just before swimming back out into the bay to see if the Octopus was still there, my arm got cold. And wet. Very fast. Catastrophic suit failure! I thumbed the dive, signaling an ascent up the slope and we proceeded into the bay for a nice slow end to the dive. Luckily only my arm got wet, but it was saturated. I haven’t found the leak yet, it was definitely in from the dry-glove ring, as my hand stayed dry.

Swimming Anemone

A Swimming Anemone, conveniently NOT swimming.

As a side note, I’ve been playing with Darktable again for editing photos. I’m running it on my Linux laptop, which has a really, really nice display. I’m finding photos don’t look quite as nice on other displays, sometimes the colours are rather dull. I have to dial it in to get my post-processing right, something to work on.

I now have to find my drysuit leak before diving again, hopefully it’ll be an easy find and fix. I’ve got a patch kit and spare seals so I’m fairly confident I’ll be back in the water soon. While I think about it, I need to rebuild one of my second stages as well.. It never ends!

 

 

Starfish Die-Off Update

Starfish

A healthy looking starfish

It was a bit eerie not seeing the usual wall of starfish due to the die-off, however I did see some healthy starfish sporadically through the dive, as evidenced in the photos below. Only one starfish in late-stage disintegration, which was unidentifiable. Hopefully the population will recover from this, one of the theories is that it’s a Malthusian check on the over-population of the starfish in the past few years.

More photos in the full article:

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An Even Longer Dive at Porteau…

Filed Under: Porteau Cove by Roko — Comments Off on An Even Longer Dive at Porteau…
September 28, 2013
octopus2

Octopus in it’s Den

With weather warnings for heavy rains and heavy winds for the afternoon, I found my way to Porteau cove in the morning for some diving before the weather set in. It was raining, but I managed to get changed into my drysuit without getting too soaked with the exception of my left foot as I hadn’t properly drained my drysuit after giving it a rinse after the previous week’s dives.

Luckily there as little wind, so we popped in for a long, shallow dive hitting most of the major highlights at Porteau. The visibility was still far from great, however I was surprised to find that the particulate in the water was much smaller. Instead of large suspended particles which are a back-scatter nightmare, it seemed to be more of a haze in the water. Good news for taking photos!

sculpin3

A Rather Brave Sculpin, Looking Up.

One of the highlights of the dive was coming out of the front of the Granthal, and coming face to face with a seal. Unfortunately the little guy bolted pretty quick, and didn’t come back for the rest of the dive. A shame given the improving vis for non-macro photos. I have a running theory that as long as I dive with a camera, I’m more or less guaranteed not have a seal spend any significant amount of time with me. Just as well that it was afraid of people, however.

Another highlight was finding a giant octopus (reminder: harvesting any marine wildlife at Porteau Cove is illegal, and Conservation Officers do watch). It was tucked into it’s den making it hard to line up the camera, but a couple of photos turned out.

blue-lingcod

A Vividly Coloured Lingcod

Seeing both a seal close up and finding an octopus on the same dive truly made it amazing, but I suppose when you spend 106 minutes underwater, it increases the odds of seeing things! Luckily the water was still “warm”, so I didn’t get too cold at the end of the dive. In the end the severe weather warnings didn’t seem to really materialize, and we had a fantastic dive.  I’m happy with the photos I got on this dive, and it’s hard to select a few to highlight in the post.

 

 

Starfish Die-Off Update

carnage2

Giant Pink Starfish in Early Stages of Dissintegration

Interesting to note, last week I saw what looked to be a disintegrating Giant Pink Starfish. For the past month and a half we’ve been seeing Sunflower Starfish and Morning Sun Stars dying off en-mase, however this was the first I’d seen of another species. Today I saw plenty more of the 5-armed stars in various states of decay, confirming that another species appears to be dying off at Porteau Cove now. The Vancouver Aquarium’s AquaBlog has some thoughts on the earlier die-off, however it’s curious to see another species now dying away. Again, this could be a perfectly natural and regular occurrence, I simply don’t know. I’ve put up some photos in the gallery at the bottom of this post.

(If there’s no gallery, click the “View Full Article” link below)

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Stepping into Doubles at Whytecliff

Filed Under: Whytecliff by Roko — Comments Off on Stepping into Doubles at Whytecliff
September 15, 2013
Hermit Crab

A brave Hermit Crab who didn’t hide when I came in close for a great photo

Cold water diving necessitates thick insulation, which in turn requires a lot of weight to sink. With a steel tank, 5kg steel backplate and another 6kg of lead, I decided I needed more weight on my back, so I switched to doubles. Luckily the rigging for doubles is heavy enough to allow losing some of the lead ballast, but the entire rig is still rather heavy on the surface.

In the water, the doubles were a dream — They trimmed out well, and I didn’t have to fight them. After a sloppy valve drill (need to work on that) I felt comfortable enough to carry on with the dive and start taking photos.

The next step is to polish my skills and upgrade to a Fundies Tech pass…

Painted Greenling

A Painted Greenling posing nicely. Ironically, they’re not green.

Just one long dive today, starting in the bay then heading out to the plumose gardens. There was a touch of current out in the gardens due to the large interchange, but it was a good dive regardless. Plenty of rockfish, squat lobsters, hermit crabs, nudibranchs of various types and the other usual suspects. I managed to snap some photos I’m happy with today.

We found a cool glass sponge at about 22 meters as well. One thing I love about glass sponges is that it provides hiding places for so many small critters, and it’s a lot of fun to peek into all the nooks and crannies to  see what you’ll find.

The Starfish die-off was still very evident today, and I’ve documented that in a separate post.

Residents of the Glass Sponge

A Hermit Crab and a Shrimp sharing a crevice in the Glass Sponge

After we had thumbed the dive, on the ascent I found a Grunt Sculpin peaking out from a giant barnacle, the perfect photo opportunity. Unfortunately a thumbed dive is a thumbed dive, and with my camera stowed I couldn’t get a photo. It looked like there was a lot of interesting things in that area (near the rocks by the day marker) so I’ll have to go back sometime and look for photo opportunities.

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Diving the Cut at Whytecliff

Filed Under: Whytecliff by Roko — 1 Comment
September 7, 2013
Decorator on Sponge

A Decorator Crab on a Glass Sponge — Illuminated by my Can Light.

Another dive site I’ve somehow neglected since moving out here has been “The Cut” at Whytecliff. So, in good measure Josh and I decided to go dive it. The Cut itself is a fun dive site, with an interesting descent that ultimately leads incredibly deep. We stopped at 30 meters and went to see the glass sponges that are one of the signatures of the Cut. Unfortunately the fiber optic to sync my stobe was loose and my strobe wouldn’t fire on the first dive. I managed a couple of photos using my can light to illuminate, but nothing special.

The Glass Sponges are really interesting. Very intricately shaped, with lots of good hiding spots for critters. There was one with a false lobster hanging out which would have made a fantastic photo. Definitely a spot worth checking out.

Glass Sponge

Ambient Light photo of a large Glass Sponge.

Our second dive we decided to swim from the cut into the bay. A bit of current worked against us so I didn’t take too many photos in the anenome garden. Again, not too many great photos out of this dive, but the dive itself was great, especially exploring the bay which seemed to be full of Frosted Nudibranchs. I even saw a yellow and white-tipped Nudi, but unfortunately the photo didn’t turn out well. The dive was capped off with some drills and a very smooth free-water ascent.

Interestingly, the shallows around the cut seemed to be full of dead, half disintegrated starfish. This was rather unusual. Later in the week after the dive some news articles started popping up about the mysterious die-off: “Massive Starfish Die-Off Baffles Scientists“. I’m curious if this is a natural phenomenon (Population surge, disease, etc.) or something related to humans (pollution, etc). I didn’t get any photos of the dead starfish at the time, because to be honest it wasn’t the most photogenic subject. I’ll try and get some shots to document it next time I’m out. In the meantime, the link I posted above has some shots of the phenomenon. Also some tin-foil-hat worthy comments in the comments section….

Some photos from the dive below the jump..

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Summer Diving in Tuwanek

Filed Under: Tuwanek by Roko — Comments Off on Summer Diving in Tuwanek
July 27, 2013

After a long few weeks of moving and business travel keeping me out of the water, Josh and I hopped on the early ferry this morning for a couple of rewarding dives up in Tuwanek. The weather was fantastic, and the viz down below 15 meters was epic. It must have opened up more than 20 meters in visibility. As always, lots of life to see in Tuwanek, which is why it truly is one of the local gems.

Unfortunately, however, I had to do this dive without a strobe on my camera. While doing some equipment checks last night, I discovered my strobe wasn’t working. This is the second time I’ve had strobe issues at Tuwanek. Of course, I have the internal camera flash completely masked off in my case, so it was of no use this time around.  (The internal flash triggers my external strobe, however to avoid back scatter the internal flash needs to be fully masked off). Not to be deterred, I decided to bring the camera along anyways and try taking some ambient light photos anyways. I figured I could even use my newly upgraded LED can light to illuminate some things too.

Was it ever worth it!

Red Gilled Nudibranch

A Red Gilled Nudibranch

Although I didn’t manage a lot of great shots, I did get some okay shots. I also managed to get the above shot of an Red Gilled Nudibranch*. For this shot, I used my LED canlight to side-illuminate the nudibranch.  It produced a rather nice effect focusing light and attention on the Nudi, almost like a snoot.  This has to be one of my favorite nudibranch photos I’ve taken so far.

Grunt Sculpin

Grunt Sculpin

Shortly later, I saw a Grunt Scuplin, which have to me my favorite type of scuplin. Something about their colouring, shape, and the way they sort of hop around makes them interesting to watch and look at. I only had one chance to take a photo, as right after it decided it no longer wanted to be party to photo taking and turned around to face a rock. Regardless, I got a fun picture, again using my can light to illuminate the fish from the side. It could have turned out better, but I like it regardless.

Early into our second dive, Josh got my attention and pointed out a swimming  giant nudibranch! I tried taking a video, but it had stopped swimming by the time I got the camera set up. Some photos are in the gallery at the bottom of this post.

Seascape

A Typical Seascape at Tuwanek

The amazing thing about Tuwanek is just how much life is packed into the area. It truly is like diving in a fishtank. The small tides, sheltered conditions, amazing visibility and warm water temperatures all combine to make it one of my favorite BC dive sites. The Sunshine Coast in general is fantastic as well. At least the ferry ride is relatively quick to get out there for day-trips!

I don’t have a RAW editor installed at the moment, so I’ve only tried touching up a few of the ambient light photos. My camera doesn’t have the best low light performance, but I got some interesting shots anyways. Perhaps later I may fiddle with processing some more of the RAW images to see if any are worth recovering and posting.

The rest of the photos I have processed are below;

*Note: I initially miss-ID’d this as an Opalescent Nudibranch (Hence the jpg filename). Upon checking my handy reference book, it is in fact a Red Gilled Nudibranch.

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Diving the Sechelt Inlet

Filed Under: Tuwanek by Roko — Comments Off on Diving the Sechelt Inlet
July 3, 2013
Steffy

Steffy in Amazing Viz

My lovely dive partner and I had the opportunity to spend a night with family up in the Sechelt Inlet, at a beach house Steffy’s parents had rented south of Tuwanek. (Luckily the Ferrets were feeling much better after their bout of illness on the weekend, otherwise we would have had to cancel on this short but fun trip!)

The beach house  had a dock, which made for an easy giant-stride entry right from where we set up and put on our gear. Quite a treat compared to huffing gear all the way down to the water at Whytecliff.

A lot of new stuff in this dive, including my upgraded dive-light (which worked amazingly), my new Heser backplate, simple fleece undergarments instead of my thick Mk3 (The water was very warm) and the first time taking my camera out in nearly a year! It took a bit of shaking out, but we got a couple of great dives in. The Viz below the first few meters was incredible, as always in the Sechelt inlet.

Unfortunately, my camera got bumped on sometime during the trip out and the battery was nearly dead by the time we got into the water. Nonetheless, I got a few nice shots. Not some of my greatest photos, but not bad for being out of practice with the camera!

Nudibranch

A Couple of Nudibranch

The new dive light worked phenomenally well, but in some of my photos I realised I had developed a bad habbit. Since the old HID had been fairly dim in comparison, I used it as an aiming light. Usually I’d point it away as I released the shutter, but sometimes would leave it since it barely effected my photos. Not so much with the bright LED. You can clearly see my little mistake with the Grunt Scuplin photo. I think it’s time to invest in a proper focus light.

The Heser plate was amazing as well, being able to do away with the weight belt completely with lighter insulation was very liberating. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free while cold water diving!

I borrowed Steff’s Dad’s GoPro camera for the dive and had it mounted on my goodman handle, but unfortunately the video seems to have become corrupted. I’m trying to recover it, and if I’m successful I’ll post a video in the coming days.

A few more pictures below:

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Porteau Cove in the Heat of the August Long Weekend

Filed Under: Porteau Cove by Roko — Comments Off on Porteau Cove in the Heat of the August Long Weekend
August 5, 2012
coolunkfish

This tiny guy posed nicely for a shot. I’m really happy with how it turned out!

I haven’t posted in quite a while, due to a combination of dives where I didn’t take any decent photos, long business trips, and not being able to find my camera. Luckily, I found my camera the other day just in time for a couple of dives at Porteau cove on one of the hottest days of the year! My drysuit flooded severely, but luckily it was warm enough that my insulation kept me warm enough to manage a couple of good one hour dives.

In spite of not having had my camera in the water for a while, I managed to get some decent shots. I’ve posted quite a few today, as I liked how a lot of them turned out, if not for the technical photographic qualities of the photos, but rather more for the subject matter of the photos. There is so much life hidden in the waters here, that’s very easy to overlook if you’re not looking hard.

Hidden Octopus

This guy was too well hidden to light up properly for a good photo, but Octopus photos are fun nonetheless!

Some of the highlights from these dives were a couple of Octopuses, however they were well hidden so I couldn’t get any good photos of them. Another spot in Porteau had hundreds of Opalescent Nudibranch in a small area, which was amazing. I spent some time hovering just above the bottom trying to take some close up photos of the better-posed ones. This proved quite a challenge, as I had to maintain perfect buoyancy and trim so as to not touch the bottom and accidentally crush any of them, since they were literally everywhere.

There were also decorator crabs all around the reef structures, including plenty of very small, potentially juvenile longhorn and graceful decorators. Graceful decorators are very hard to spot, as often they blend in perfectly with the bottom, so you have to be very adept at noticing subtle movements and the blob-like shape they make. Taking photographs of them is also very difficult, due to how well they blend in to the background. Setting up the strobe to get a good shadow on the crab, and striving for a black or contrasting background appears the key to get them to be noticeable in a photo, but is very difficult to accomplish.

Lingcod

A Lingcod who wasn’t photo-shy

As usual, lingcod were sitting everywhere, including some massive ones. I tried snapping some photos of them and have included them below. They’re somewhat skittish, so it’s difficult to adjust a strobe from close to the camera (for macro photos) to far out (to reduce backscatter when photographing larger subjects) without spooking them. There’s not much in the local shallow waters that’s bigger than a lingcod, so a large, awkward, loud, bubbly scuba diver must be somewhat concerning to them.

Another highlight was the large schools of different kinds of fish above some of the shallower reefs. Some of these fish are amazingly colourful. One day hopefully I’ll have powerful enough dual strobes and a wide angle lens to actually manage a decent photo of them! (Dreaming of a DSLR camera)

Anyways, without rambling on too much more, the rest of my photos are below! I’m off to try and find the massive leak in my drysuit….

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Pea Soup at Porteau Cove

Filed Under: Porteau Cove by Roko — Comments Off on Pea Soup at Porteau Cove
April 15, 2012
Longhorn Decorator Crab

A Longhorn Decorator Crab, posing nicely on a retracted plumose anemone.

Perhaps “Pea Soup” is a bit of an extreme description of the visibility at Porteau today, as I’ve seen worse in some deep mountain lakes, but after a long surface swim Josh and I dropped down on the Granthal to enjoy a nice dive with only 5-10 feet of visibility with plenty of particulates in the water. (This cleared up to a solid 10 feet of visibility below 50 feet or so.) It looks like the spring algae bloom has arrived.

Regardless of the visibility, we had a couple of great dives, with plenty of things to see. Some of the highlights included a huge number of decorator crabs, both Longhorn and Graceful. Plenty of nudibranch and other critters made appearances, including many Lingcod (some guarding egg masses). It never ceases to amaze me just how much life you can spot in the “muck” if you slow down and look carefully. Even on days with poor visibility, there is a lot to see.

Opalescent Nudibranch

An Opalescent Nudibranch. There were several of these out and about, including some very tiny ones.

Due to the large amount of particulates in the water, I struggled with backscatter on any of the larger subjects (such as the Lingcod) or subjects where I tried to get black background. (In retrospect I should have adjusted the aperture to blur the background and try to hide the backscatter). I think the photos turned out pretty well. Try to spot the individual limbs on the very well camouflaged Graceful Decorators!

It’s been a great month for diving so far, hopefully I can squeeze in yet another couple of dive days before the month’s end….

See all the photos below:

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