MRXRAY
Contributor
Met up with Brandon and Recharge for a late afternoon dive at Navarre Beach Pier. The weather was looking gorgeous at the water looked absolutely wonderful. The new pier is moving along very quickly now and they are putting in the fifth set of pilings in the water and they are have finished removing the railing from the old pier as part of the demolition of that pier. Scary! :depressed:
We had noticed the purple flag was flying indicating a Marnie life warning and I could only guess that we were going to run into some old friends the sea nettle jellyfish. We did see some one the way out and while diving but only about 4 or 5 and all were avoidable.
The three of us slowly made our way toward the end of the pier, me stopping at every piling to take photos and the others acting patient with my slow pace. We all made it to the end of the pier and the turned and began looking for any rubble that may have been uncovered by the recent storms we had.....Nothing new! As we approached the only remaining piece of rubble a very large ray took off which clouded up the water a bit, but in the haze I could just make out my old friend..... Yup, Chunk the sea turtle. I had photographed and video'd him over a dozen times last year and now he's back, guess he missed me. I followed Chunk around video and photographing him as he moved about looking for grass to eat and I could not have been happier with his eagerness to be photo'd and video'd. We left Chunk after a bit as we did not want to stress him and headed off to the old pier pilings to see if we could scare up an Octopus, and after a brief swim, we found just a few remaining pilings and a real nice sized Octopus. He wasn't to keen on playing today and I had no snacks to offer so we let him be and investigated around a bit more before heading back to the pier area and eventually back to shore. Our dive lasted 74 minutes and I recorded a max depth of 19 feet and a min water temp of 84*. I would put the viz at it's best at around 25 feet but sometimes the viz would drop to about 5. All in all a real nice dive... Here are a few pics:
We had noticed the purple flag was flying indicating a Marnie life warning and I could only guess that we were going to run into some old friends the sea nettle jellyfish. We did see some one the way out and while diving but only about 4 or 5 and all were avoidable.
The three of us slowly made our way toward the end of the pier, me stopping at every piling to take photos and the others acting patient with my slow pace. We all made it to the end of the pier and the turned and began looking for any rubble that may have been uncovered by the recent storms we had.....Nothing new! As we approached the only remaining piece of rubble a very large ray took off which clouded up the water a bit, but in the haze I could just make out my old friend..... Yup, Chunk the sea turtle. I had photographed and video'd him over a dozen times last year and now he's back, guess he missed me. I followed Chunk around video and photographing him as he moved about looking for grass to eat and I could not have been happier with his eagerness to be photo'd and video'd. We left Chunk after a bit as we did not want to stress him and headed off to the old pier pilings to see if we could scare up an Octopus, and after a brief swim, we found just a few remaining pilings and a real nice sized Octopus. He wasn't to keen on playing today and I had no snacks to offer so we let him be and investigated around a bit more before heading back to the pier area and eventually back to shore. Our dive lasted 74 minutes and I recorded a max depth of 19 feet and a min water temp of 84*. I would put the viz at it's best at around 25 feet but sometimes the viz would drop to about 5. All in all a real nice dive... Here are a few pics: