Very Good Dives with Beachhopper II at Hopkin's Deep and Metridium Mountain January 16, 2024

Last Saturday, January 11, I kicked off my diving for 2025 with post retirement dives #810 at Hopkin's Deep and #811 at Metridium Mountain. I was diving with Guy Foster and were joined by many of the usual gang, Ed in his blinding new drysuit, his much better half, Homani, Rick, Stephen, Debra, and ....We had around 20 ft of visibility. I tried out a new combination, I dove with my drysuit with my new deluxe Sharkskin II plush skin with a sweater, I discovered, again, that though dry you've got to have lots of warm underclothes to be comfortable so I got pretty chilled with this combination, I'll double up layers the next time out. Both sites are rich with sealife and have lots of rockfish and some Cabezon and Lingcod. As soon as I started attempting to take pictures I discovered that my always reliable INON strobe, which has had heavy use for 18 years, wouldn't fire. I was surprised because, from long experience, I've learned you better always take a photo on shore when your're ready to pack your camera for the dive because otherwise you'll find a problem when your out on your dive and it is neither convenient nor safe for your camera to open up its dive case to solve a problem. Below is the photo I took in our dining room of one of my wife Donna's paintings on the wall. The strobe definitely had successfully fired...

Happily when I got home and opened up my camera case I found that, somehow, the pop up flash of my vintage Canon T2i Rebel had gotten pushed down so my strobe's failure to flash was simply because it didn't receive a triggering flash via fiber cable...I had steeled myself and negotiated with my wife that I was probably going to visit Backscatter and buy a new strobe, etc. etc. But no bank account draining visit there is immediately necessary after all. I demonstrated to Guy that my strobe wasn't firing by taking what would normally have been a momentarily blinding shot of his face. Below:

So, I realized that, though I was shooting with my 60 mm Canon macro lens I could still take some pictures with my pointer light and I shifted to an f stop of 5.6 to do some shooting and I'm very pleased with a few of the shots I took. I lucked onto a cooperative Cabezon, one of my favorite subjects, and it let me get really close. Below:

I next found a cooperative Lingcod, below:

We descended through a sea of pyrosomes, four to eight inches long. I photographed a couple of unfortunate ones being consumed by voracious sea anemones. Below:

Next up was a Gopher Rockfish followed by a curious Kelp Rockfish, below:

I had to try photographing Strawberry Anemones with my pointer light for illumination, below:

Then I shot a Metridium, aka Plumrose Anemone, below:

My final subject was a Hudson's Nudibranch, about 3 inches long, below:

Well, then I captured myself studying my non flashing strobe after surfacing! Below:

Next up for this year's diving will be the Maldives, long on Donna and my list of places we wanted to dive. We'll be at a shore based resort for February 5-7 after a one day stop in Singapore on our way out, followed by diving with a group organized by Richard Salas on Theia Dune February 8 -18, below: https://liveaboard.dune-world.com/trip/central-and-south-atolls-theia/