Third Blog from my wonderful Crystal Blue Resort diving January 20 through February 5, 2024

Because of the 55 dives in 17 days at the delightful Crystal Blue Resort and, thanks to oour excellent guide, Jhomer, I have a plethora of pictures I want to share, I'm doing multiple blogs for this trip. Nearly all my underwater photos, very unusually for me, were shot with my 60 mm Canon lens instead of my beloved Tokina 10 - 17 mm wide angle lens I use for 90% of my photography. The significant exception on this trip was that I still chose to shoot with my wideangle "just point and shoot" Tokina lens on several of our Dark Water dives in my final week because it is so easy to attempt a photo instead of the surprisingly difficult task of finding a small, usually swimming, subject in the dark with the very narrow field of view with my excellent 60 mm lens. I choose easy and quick vs slow and perfect for the vast majority of my underwater photos so I get lots of ok to good photos vs the magazine quality photos taken by many of my fellow photographers, especially Audry, during Critterfest and Dark Water Safari. This is compounded by my laziness and impatience on doing very much Lightroom touchup on my photos....so, for instance, backscatter is frequently noticeable in my photos because my life is too short to remove it. Here's a look at what its like to dive from the ubiquitous Philippine pangas used for diving at the resort. Thanks to their outriggers, the long, narrow pangas are very stable platforms. They have very good canopies so that it is usually pretty easy to avoid unwanted sun while also offering space to get out into the sun if you prefer.

Above: Here's a from the resort looking down look at one of the pangas. The bow is facing you and note the long plank resting across the bow, this is how one gets into the panga from shore to go diving and how you get back out of the panga when you return to the resort from your dives. Below: Here's a view of pangas waiting for us to suit up and board for diving.

Below: Getting on and off at shore using the boarding plank. Key things, fortunately, the hard working crew get your gear, tanks, fins, masks, cameras, etc. on and off the boat, also, the crew helps you walk the plank on and off in case you are balance challenged, very important!

Below: Audry about to board and getting help disembarking. Our wonderful guide, Jhomer, getting off after Audry and I.

Back to diving photos! There were lots of Anemone Fish to be seen on just about every dive, but one of the really cool things on these dives is that our guides frequently pointed out Anemone fish tending their eggs. In the first three photos below the eggs are the small reddish purplish grayish mass beside the anemone fish. If you paid attention, you could see just laid eggs and you at other times got to see eggs that were fully developed and could see the eyes of the baby Anemone Fish about to hatch. Their parents were busy ventilating the eggs and keeping them clean. Below:

I always love seeing ribbon eels, below is a Blue male ribbon eel followed by a black female ribbon eel:

There were plenty of moray eels as well:

Coral dwelling blennies and Fang Tooth Blennies:

I had time near one of my safety stops when I was making the way back to the boat by myself, because I always went through my air faster than Audrey and our guide, to calm hover near the sand and patiently wait for a Taylor's Garden Eel to come out close enough to shoot:

My next blog will have some of the amazing Frogfish I saw on this trip and other cool creatures.