Had a nice night dive Friday night, lots of little guys to see at Fly Point, group was a bit big as I was just tagging along with a Pro Dive crew but it was still good despite low vis, lots of big decorator crabs on the red corals (gorgonians?).
Saturday I spent most of the day editing my video from Fish Rock and reliving that amazing experience. I've been telling everyone how good it was and I think I probably stirred up a little business for the guys at SW Rocks ;-) Vimeo link coming soon!
And today, Sunday I just got back from two shore dives. I was hoping to tag along on a "superman drift" as that sounded quite exciting when you get out off the point and catch the heavy current flooding into the port, and speed along at 3-4 knots across big sand bars and lots of soft corals, but sadly everyone from the shop seemed to have other duties. Instead I tagged along with an advanced course's first drift dive which wasn't too terribly exciting, just along the length of Halifax. Once the tide was in, I swapped tanks and met one of the regulars who always seems happy to show people around. He's a very experienced old timer, been in the region longer than most of the dive shops, knows his stuff, great person to dive with.
We dropped down off the east end of Halifax and saw all kinds of nice stuff in the deep end at a very calm pace, but I learned a good lesson here - it's one of the first times I've done a second dive without an organized group and I hadn't thought much about surface interval or bottom time. My buddy hadn't done the drift dive, and due to the timing of the tide my surface interval was quite short. Once we got down to 25m I was a bit surprised to see I had a No Deco time of 7 minutes, we were only 15-20m into the dive. I followed a long a bit and with 3 mins left signalled that I had to take a shallower profile. The tide was starting to run out anyway, you don't get long dives here unless you're a fan of serious cardio exercise, but I was a bit surprised that the time didn't come up too quickly even as I ascended to 15m. Well, it's one of those moments, once you are away from the baby sitters and realize you have to think for yourself. It all went well and up at the safety stop we found a octopus in the open, I got a lot of good macro footage of him but only as I was leaving I noticed what was going on -- one of his arms was extended and pulling on a rock the whole time, and I finally noticed that behind the rock, in a burrow, was another octopus holding the entrance shut with that rock! You could just see the little eyes sticking up behind the rock... hilarious.