Diving with Raymond

Today, we dove near the heli-pad, at Raymond’s usual spot. I had only snorkeled this bit so far, and was amazed by the fish we saw, at around 8 meters. There were plenty of anemone fish, puffer fish, lizard fish, and cornet fish. Especially the anemone fish were very frequent; we must have seen close to 100.
Visibility was around 5 meters, but it was increasingly dark at 8 meters, leading to lots of shaky shots whenever the flash was switched off. The built-in flash however causes a lot of backscatter and even worse dark shadows by the lens (in close-ups). I guess this really calls for an external strobe.
I took plenty of pictures of fish, but most did not turnout well. The anemone fish were particularly hard to shoot, as they moved around so quickly. Finally, I gave up, and decided to put them on video instead.
Water was warm, with a 3mm shorty, hood, booties and Kevlar gloves, I could have stayed forever. Christel got a bit cold during the second dive; we only had a 25 min interval to warm up, and both dives lasted around 45 min. 9lbs of weights easily proved enough for either of us, even when carrying the positively buoyant camera.
Besides the clown fish, the real highlight of the day was my ingenious way of transporting the scuba equipment on the motorbike. We each put our stuff into a bag, and strapped those onto our BCD, the way one would strap on a tank. This way, the BCD made great backpack.
Besides this, Raymond had his ingenious fresh water shower stolen, as he left it near the rode for us to use. It consisted of a 20 liter canister, with a shower hose. The canister had an inflator inlet, and was powered by air from our tanks.