Charlie's Diving Blog: My Favorite Dive Photos for 2023

I just cancelled my last dive outing for 2023 because of a series of winter storms with huge swells coming in from now until the Saturday dive that Guy Foster, Tessa, and I had scheduled. So, below are some of my favorite dive photos, not necessarily my best photos, for me, the subject is more important than the perfection of the photo. To see the rest, please go to: https://photos.app.goo.gl/5E4zrZ9LEu8nffx88 The diving year started with a wonderful 18 day diving trip on the Raja Laut in Raja Ampat, Indonesia with Donna and great friends from previous dive trips with Tom Campbell and Beth Davidow. I made all but two of the available dives, I think 39. Raja Ampat lived up to its reputation with incredible reefs, huge numbers and varieties of fish, Mantas, a few sharks, cuttlefish, octopus, etc.etc. Below: Anemonefish, Spadefish school with a spectacular sea fan, well camouflaged Scorpionfish

Below: Donna and I were teamed with good friends Dorothy and Dennis and Dennis took my camera to take this picture of us

At the start of our trip I told the guides that I badly wanted to see a Wobbegong Shark, which I'd never encountered in any of my many dives in the tropical Pacific. The guides laughed and assured me I'd see plenty, and I did. Cool fish! Below:

We saw several huge schools of Big Eye Jacks, below:

Below: Beautiful seascapes, beautiful corals, my beautiful wife!

A wonderful dive site is Arborek Jetty. A fish eye view of the jetty, Dorothy, Dennis, a Crocodilefish, and a Cuttlefish, below:

Below: Donna with a truly Giant Clam, with an Anemonefish in her face from the clan in their anemone below, videoing a well camouflaged Scorpionfish, and a closer look at the Scorpionfish:

One of my favorite large South Pacific fish (we actually dived in both the North and South Pacific on this trip, we even had a dive where we crossed from the North to the South Pacific by crossing the equator underwater!) is the Barramundi Grouper (or Cod). The picture below was taken from a very memorable encounter. The Barramundi was being plagued by a very persistant small, maybe seven inch, Remora. The Barramundi drew my attention when he kept trying to first, scrape it off on the coral and on the bottom rubble, and then, when he kept swimming up against a hole under the coral where a moral eel was dwelling. I'm not sure whether or not he succeeded in getting the Moray to eat the remora but if it didn't, it wasn't from lack of trying. Below:

Below are a couple shots of another favorite large fish, the Napoleon Wrasse. The hand signal for sighting a Napoleon Wrasse, is, what else? A salute!

I also enjoyed a couple night dives on this trip, below are a couple denizens from these dives:

Following the wonderful Raja Ampat diving trip on the Raja Lau diveboat Donna and I went on to New Zealand, stored our dive gear, no diving. After this trip we returned home for a couple of weeks and then went to Dunedin, Florida to celebrate my oldest sister's birthday and a family reunion. I managed to squeeze in one day of diving out in the Gulf where I dived constantly from 1967 to 1977 before moving to California to work for HP after graduating from USF in Tampa. Below: Favorite fish in the Gulf include Hogfish, Red (and Black/Gag) Grouper, Sheepshead, and, they weren't protected when I started spearfishing, Goliath Grouper:

Our dive site, Clearwater Wreck, included a very curious large Loggerhead Sea Turtle:

Returning to California, I had 21 dives in Monterey and Carmel Bays this year, some with Greg Hoberg and his RIB zodiac and some with Guy Foster and his daughter Tessa on Beachhopper II. I didn't do any California shore dives again this year, partly because they are a lot of work and I didn't spend any time at our Pacific Grove house and also because my favorite shore dive site, Otter Cove in Pacific Grove, no longer has its magnificent Giant Kelp Forest because a plague of sea urchins has transformed the coast there to endless urchin barrens because the top urchin predator, the Sunflower Sea star, has been rendered locally extinct since the nightmarish sea star wasting disease in 2013. A sample of Monterey/Carmel favorite dive photos below: