As was riding home from Papa Gino’s tonight, I noticed a lot of strong lightning in the clouds in front of me. There was no rain, and in fact, it was clear overhead, but there was an almost constant interplay of lightning lighting up a cloud to the southeast. As soon as I got home, I grabbed the camera and tripod, and headed for the golf course for a better view. These are a couple of the pictures I got; the camera was set to manual focus, manual shutter speed of several seconds, and f/9 -10.
I did another pair of dives at Pebble Beach yesterday, this time as part of the East Coast Divers shore dive. It was good to see Ken Apple, who was running the dive, again.
For me, Pebble is not a particularly edifying site because you have a fairly long swim over the sand to get to the reefs, and getting into the water over all the cobbles can be hard. It was a little easier the first dive since the tide was low enough that the water’s edge was right at the sand.
Mostly what we saw was crabs. Lots of crabs, big and small.
Crab
Crab in the kelp
Sand Collar
Last week, at Folly, I shot a number of pictures of this thing, which I was vaguely aware was some sort of egg casing. I didn’t know what had made it, so I turned to my friend Ralph Fuller, of Poseidon’s Web, who identified it as a “sand collar”, an egg casing left by moon snails. I was a little surprised, because it doesn’t look at all snail shaped, and because it’s bigger than most moon snails I’ve seen.
Well, now I’m certainly a believer, because I saw the biggest moon snail I’ve ever seen. It’s very easy to see how it could have created something like that:
One of the biggest moon snails I’ve seen
I was diving with very new divers; Sam on the first dive, and Sam and Phillip on the second; both were newly certified. On the second dive, Philip managed to startle and grab a small lobster; he made his first lobster catch.
Philip’s first catch. (Not a keeper.)
This gallery contains 6 photos.
After several weeks of being out of commission due to a cold and back and shoulder problems, I’m finally able to do stuff on my days off again. Today I did the East Coast Divers shore dive to Folly Cove. The first dive was on the left hand side. The left side of Folly is a steep rocky cliff; and there used to be tons of anemones there. Then one year, there were none. Today, I finally saw a few today; the first ones I’ve seen at Folly in a long time. Continue reading
Passengers in the balloon behind us
I don’t know who these folks are, but they were in the balloon behind us, and I figured I’d post it on the off chance that they or someone who knows them would spot it.