More things seen
A tiny active octopus, tooling around on the sand, black and spiky and smooth and tan by turns, not quite scared enough by the giant maybe-predators to ink.
A yellow nudibranch, looking exactly like a lemon wedge on an ocean cocktail.
Teeny tiny sand dollars and sanddabs. No relation.
Sun stars, bat stars, leather stars, ochre stars in a profusion of colors.
Sunlight streaming through a rocky kelp forest.
A brown rockfish chasing my divemaster out of its territory.
Two large sea cucumbers, looking like kelp leaves until I noticed they had curvature and a suspicious mouth at one end.
Big waves at the entry point, which knocked me down and stole my fin. Twice. Fin was miraculously found again, twice, and I made it through the waves eventually.
A juvenile harbor seal, wanting to play and possibly see if we had fish in the float nearby (that wasn't ours).
(Being knocked down by waves while wearing scuba gear is pretty scary. Under normal circumstances, you get knocked over and it's no big deal. You might get saltwater in your mouth, but you can stand up pretty easily multiple times as you make your way back. Wearing scuba gear is a different matter: It's so heavy that standing up is no small task, and if you end up on your back without enough water to support you, it's even harder to get up again because you have no leverage. Fortunately that didn't happen to me and I got out pretty quickly. I had to take a break before getting back in, though, and even sitting down in scuba gear is tiring.)
A yellow nudibranch, looking exactly like a lemon wedge on an ocean cocktail.
Teeny tiny sand dollars and sanddabs. No relation.
Sun stars, bat stars, leather stars, ochre stars in a profusion of colors.
Sunlight streaming through a rocky kelp forest.
A brown rockfish chasing my divemaster out of its territory.
Two large sea cucumbers, looking like kelp leaves until I noticed they had curvature and a suspicious mouth at one end.
Big waves at the entry point, which knocked me down and stole my fin. Twice. Fin was miraculously found again, twice, and I made it through the waves eventually.
A juvenile harbor seal, wanting to play and possibly see if we had fish in the float nearby (that wasn't ours).
(Being knocked down by waves while wearing scuba gear is pretty scary. Under normal circumstances, you get knocked over and it's no big deal. You might get saltwater in your mouth, but you can stand up pretty easily multiple times as you make your way back. Wearing scuba gear is a different matter: It's so heavy that standing up is no small task, and if you end up on your back without enough water to support you, it's even harder to get up again because you have no leverage. Fortunately that didn't happen to me and I got out pretty quickly. I had to take a break before getting back in, though, and even sitting down in scuba gear is tiring.)