Yesterday was a great day for diving. I was with my friend Jack, along with Barbara, Alek and Natalia on Jack’s boat anchored off Loblolly Cove in Rockport. The weather was perfect; warm, sunny, not too windy, and not much of a swell. Awesome conditions for the first weekend of Fall.

Jack, Barbara and I did the first and last dives, while Alek and Natalia did a dive in the middle. Visibility was pretty so-so, and it’s easy to get separated in a threesome, so I tried to stick close. Jack was lobstering, with Barbara spotting for him, while I was concentrating on my camera. Right as we came down the anchor line, we saw a flounder near the anchor. There were a lot of lobsters around, and the rocks were swarming with cunner, a small reddish brown fish. I also saw a sea robin, which looks like a blob of seaweed until you spot the roundish body, eyes and fins, and a rock gunnel, a small pinkish eel, as well as many small jellyfish floating through the water.

While Alek and Natalia were doing their dive, we had our surface interval. There was a ton of boat traffic going by, and it was amazing how few of them recognized our dive flag. At one point, the boat was rocking pretty heavily from a particularly heavy wake.

As I surfaced from our second dive, the sun was noticeably low in the sky, a reminder that it really was Fall after all. The sunlight was golden as we motored through the Annisquam and back to the marina.