Celebrating 50 years of diving, a fun Octopus encounter, Komodo, Indonesia from January, 2014

May 7, 2017 was my fifty year anniversary of becoming a certified scuba diver in 1967.  I already celebrated with a wonderful diving trip on the Nai'a in Fiji last month.  I've decided to gather together favorite diving photos from my half century of diving.  I started with the more recent years with photos conveniently on file on my laptop.  Yesterday I enjoyed finding a sequence of photos recording a really long, fun, encounter with an octopus in Komodo, Indonesia, on the Seven Seas dive boat in 2014.  I think you'll enjoy these too.

 While wandering about by myself in Horseshoe Bay, Rinca, I came upon a nice sized Day Octopus, Octopus cyanea, I believe, out actively hunting.  I ended up spending at least 20 to 30 minutes with it, great fun.

 The Day Octopus can change colors in the blink of an eye, really amazing. This Octopus would have easily been 3 ft across, the head was over a foot long.

                           Blink, another color change.  It changes it's skin texture, too.

   I showed my wife this picture and she suspects that the white edged scars are from a struggle - maybe territorial, maybe romantic, with another octopus.  The octopus was totally relaxed with me hovering about, it was obviously actively hunting.

   Here a number of fish have become excited with the octopus hunting - things would try to escape as it reached into holes and the fish were eager to get a shot.  The beautiful grouper at the left of the picture is facing the octopus, you see it, right?

   I've drawn a green circle around the octopus to help the camouflage challenged.

The grouper wasn't threatening the octopus in any way, too large for this grouper, it was just intently focused on ambushing whatever escaped the octopus.

 Here the beautiful Lyretail Grouper is practically brushing my wide angle lens dome as he hovers behind the grouper.

 Here you can see how this beautiful grouper gets its common name of White Margin Lyretail Grouper from the white (ish) upper, lower, and rearmost margin of its tail fin.

 

The octopus slowed down again as it reached into every crevice, I finally broke off, I needed to save some nitrox for my safety stop. It was time to leave the octopuses garden, in the shade... I think every diver dreams of having an octopus encounter like this one.  They are wondrous creatures.