Monday, March 28, 2011

Nelson Bay 2011

New. Check out the disgorged mouth parts, and the sponge skeleton.

Crab on sponge, slug on slug.

Fatso feesh.

Crazy anemone! Pipefish. Look at his little blue spots.

Look, its a sea slug on a shark! Holy crap.

New.

Sydney Seahorse.

New.

New on new! Cleaner shrimp on a black slug.

New. I would name this one after Karin, it's so purdy. Chromodoris Kvale.

There's a crab in that pho-to.






A pineapple fish, accepted the bottom of my palm as the ocean floor.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Borneo: Mabul 2

We stayed with a couple places on Mabul, which is out on the ocean off of Semporna. I'm sporting the diver's beard.

At the first place we stayed (Scuba Junkie) there was a great dock with awesome snorkeling all around.

There was a refugee settlement next to the resort we were at, which was pretty intense. They were Philippino. This boat had rancid dog meat drying all over it, and the smell was horrible.

Some slugs...

And some stalker fish who wait for prey.




The second place we stayed was Uncle Chang's. We had to because Scuba Junkie was all booked out. The food wasn't nearly as good, but the instructors were great. All Spaniards, and I had a good time speaking Spanish with them. They spoke good English too. They were in to slugs too.

This Mantis Shrimp sees 12 different primary colours. Note how the retina has three openings per eye!

Here is the best slug I've ever seen.

Here's some fish clustered around a bit of artificial reef, which was quite good. But Uncle Chang's was a really funky, kinda dumpy resort, that was just as expensive as Scuba Junkie (which was basically 5 star). It was really poorly run. I think their main focus was getting people to go to Sipidan, which I avoided because it was 2x as expensive and I like little things.
But man this guy was HUGE, and really thrilling to come up on through a thick school of fishes.