String of Perls
The night dive tonight was amazing. I didn't see much of larger life forms, just a stray lobster and a tiny shrimp and a bunch of sleeping fish. The real show was from the bioluminescence. I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but when you move your hands in the water you excite little pieces of plankton that glow. It's really pretty and looks like there's specs of light dancing around your fingers or fins. I've seen this before in Bonaire and Key Largo so it was nothing new but still pretty cool. I was not at all prepared for what came next. Our dive master signaled us to all sit on the sandy bottom and turn our lights off. At first we didn't notice much, just a few glowing dots here and there. Almost all of a sudden, when our eyes adjusted, thousands of strands of glowing beads appeared all around us. If you were good at controlling your buoyancy without any visual aid you could push off the bottom a few feet and float in the middle of it all. The physical description alone can not describe the sensation that this experience gave you. Picture yourself weightless in pitch black space. Then, all around you strings of lights appear and slowly twist and move and dance. Above, below, all around as far as you could see. Each strand had maybe 5 or 6 active lights at a time. One would dim and go out as another one lit up at the other end giving the impression that the beads were inching along down a strand. I wonder if there is some way of recreating the scene with some 3D software (it was obviously way too dark to photograph without a tripod and really good camera).