Red Diving Hood

Some dives are better than others. This was one of the better ones. The conditions were beautiful, flat water, good viz, low tide at Folly cove that you just walk to the right wall. Under the water it was the first time I felt comfortable with the cold in my wetsuit that I could make a decently long dive enjoying all the colors of the macro life on its peak.

Once again, the nudibranchs were in abundance, especially the doto’s with all different color variations. Whenever I dive at Folly, I try to get to the overhanging ledge to look for the little C. gymnota’s hiding inside the dangling hydroid bundles. This time, to my surprise the C. gymnota’s were out in the open and they were quite big, compared to others I have seen before. That was a good surprise.

I inspected all kinds of hydroids closely to find different kinds of macro life and there were tons of them. Tiny nudis, mostly E. exiguus, little skeleton shrimps and all kinds of amphipods. Some of the photos reflect the variety of life and color in the details, sometimes I can only appreciate at home on the computer due to the scale of these life forms.

I came across some stripers and sand lances running around at the shallows and finally finished the dive after photographing the underbellies of two D. robustus hanging on a bunch of sea lettuce in the shallows.

Buddies: Jason & Amy

#409: 24 ft, 115 min, 52F

June continued to be a good time to dive Lanes Cove and observe more of the remaining nudibranchs before they disappear until next fall, except the visitor lemon nudis because they stay. I am glad we could get in plenty of dives before the parking restrictions were added on this site, as well.

Both dives we hit the wall at ~60ft, lemon nudibranchs (sea lemons) live. These big nudis like deeper land, where the water is greener. They like to eat sponges and they vary in color, from pale yellow to dark pink, maybe based on what they had earlier that day. You are what you eat, afterall.

In addition to the sea lemons, there were other few nudis as well. I think this year was the year of dotos, they were at every site at every depth in all different outfits.

#408: 53ft 72min 43F

#411: 53ft 79min 46F

This year I dove Lanes cove for the first time. There were rumors coming from the past on how, after a dive, divers found their tires slashed by the locals. That is some scary stuff and that’s why me and my buddies did not visit that site before. But in the meantime, I always saw posts on social media that people are regularly diving there, so how bad could it be. This year I finally decided to go and see it for myself and I was not disappointed.

In May, Lanes Cove was a nudi fest. We have seen all kinds of nudis in the shallows. Once we made our way to the deeper end, where the wall is, we found bunch of Sea Lemon nudi, which was a visitor from Pacific who decided to make our waters its home.

Lanes Cove has everything for all divers. Shallow diving with the sun rays hitting the granite covered with algea, deeper diving in eerie gray/green atmosphere, lobstering around the boulders. And relatively easy parking, easy entry.

I am guessing there will be more Lanes Cove dives to come.

#403: 44F, 33 ft, 102min

#406: 46F, 51 ft, 102 min

#407: 50F, 29 ft, 88 min

Old Garden Beach is not one of the sites we dive very often and the only reason I can think of is the crowd we see there every time. I don’t think I did a dive there without seeing a school of divers from another group. I really don’t like seeing other divers underwater (except my buddies 😀 )

Dan and I did two dives with a very quick surface interval. The first dive was decent so we went for the seconds. Actually the first dive should be remembered as awesome since we saw a species, stalked jellyfish, which we have never seen before. But my strobe was not working so that takes the feel down a notch. 🙂

In addition to the stalked jellyfish we saw a cool shrimp and other regular residents of old garden beach. Also, if I am not mistaken, this dive is the last dive I saw nudi for the season. Second dive was so unnotable that I left my camera alone and helped Dan lobster, which is always fun.

50F 37ft 92min / 53F 37ft 72min

Buddy: Dan H.

Finally a good night dive at Fort Wetherill. Last time it was so uninspiring we left at around 40min. This time the viz being much better, regular critters and squids being there, providing great entertainment.

Bunch of larva floating in the water column, keep trying to get a shot of the mantis shrimp, after few years still no luck.

The high point of the dive was the pregnant pipefish. Always wondered why we never see them pregnant, now we did…. Oh, and the flat worm I just couldn’t get a good photo of before it slithered away 😮

60F, 24ft, 135min

Another visit to Loblolly Point as we try to catch a few more glimpses of the nudis before they will disappear for 5 months. We still observed decent amounts but nothing close to earlier weeks.

The prominent sighting was the mating pair of F. bostoniensis with ginormous gonads :D. The O. ascidicola were mostly gone but left bazillion whit ribbons behind. There were plenty of O. muricata (or A. proxima) still getting busy. But soon they will all be gone…

46F 25ft 68min

Wow, what a couple of dives we had at Loblolly Point that day! We thought Folly Cove was nudi fest and Loblolly Cove blew our mind. There were nudibranchs everywhere and the conditions were darn good.

Based on my last 6 years of diving in NE I would say Okenia ascidicola (write that down 5 times) is a rare nudi. I have seen one few years back, only one I saw and my camera had issues earlier in the dive and I kicked myself since then. But this year, not only we saw more, basically they were throwing them on our faces! Especially at Loblolly Point we saw a bunch of these nudis and a ton of their eggs. Their beautiful, thick, white spiral egg masses were everywhere you look.

In addition to O. ascidicola, A. proxima (or Onchidoris muricata) and F. bostoniensis were the most abundant of all the nudis. F. bontoniensis were actually just flying all over the water column.

In addition I could find D. fragilis, O. bilamellata, P. dubia, D. frondosus and of course F. verucosa. Towards the end of the second dive I came across Cuthona viridis, which I think was a first for me.

In addition to the nudis, which are the main creatures occupy my attention, I did notice ridiculous numbers of baby rock gunnels. Maybe, unless they get eaten to nothing, this summer may be the year of gunnels 🙂

Buddies: Bert P, Dan H, Jason F, Amy N, Todd B.

It was a great day of diving. The water was much warmer that I could finish first dive with my first buddy, Ryan, and then catch Jason and Amy as they were getting in for their second dive without getting out to warm up. Did I freeze to death the second dive? Hell yeah!

First dive we dealt with some issues. The thermocline was extremely wide, because of all those thermocline waves I could not see much of anything between 15-25 ft depth, which was quite annoying. We did see some nudis, most notably a few Cuthona gymnota. They were pain to take pictures of, tiny, hiding in the stems of the hydroid which swayed back and forth with surge, spent probably 20 min to get a photo 🙂 . We also saw a beautiful decorator crab with colorful pompom like sponges all over it. Too bad I couldn’t get a photo of it.

Second dive I was cold, because I was too lazy to get out of water between my dives to warm up. We saw variety of nudis again in the middle reef including two big lemon drop nudis and if I am not wrong another C. gymnota. My first searaven of the season also showed itself to me, a small brown-red searaven.

Buddies: Ryan M, Jason F, Amy N.

What else can a person ask for on a birthday, great weather, great dive, bunch of nudis and other cool creatures great dive buddies.

We hit Folly Cove again, all of the divers in New England (it looked like), The conditions looked great and we did have a great dive. Finally I could see a nudi I have never seen before, dendronotus robustus, thanks to Amy and Jason. It was pretty and quite big compared to the nudis we usually get around here. However, there is not such thing as “usual” in this nudi season. They were big, a lot and diverse. As a macro photographer I cannot complain even tho I really tried.

The water is getting warmer and it allowed us to have a nice long dive even in wetsuit. The season is started and I am quite excited about it!

Buddies: Bert, Dan, Jason, Todd, Amy

51F, 17ft, 87min (I don’t remember the viz but probably pretty good)

I skipped some dives between this report and the last one I wrote, some were not worthy because I was just getting used to cold diving and the others I will hopefully write a summery for soon.

This dive at Back Beach was very special for me. Not because it was my first dive here in 2-3 years, nor because it was an easy nudi dive. It was a special dive for me because today my dive buddy was my sister!

It has been few years that I infected my sister with dive bug and since then it has been a chronic condition for her. We dove together in Turkey, we dove in Costa Rica and even in Blue Heron Bridge (FL) many times. But I never had a chance to show her my green waters here and I never thought I could. See, she dives in Florida in May in 5mm wetsuit.

But, I was not born yesterday. I have been in these cold waters for a while and I know ways to cope with the. For todays dive I had my drysuit but I had a 7 mm wetsuit with additional 7mm shortie with hoodies for her. On top I had a 7 mm mitts to keep her hands warm. And with the warm water we poured into her suit and boots and mitts before we enter the water she could sustain her body heat longer; and she did. To my surprise we had a 50min dive and she did not freeze to death. I was so proud of her and so happy that I could show her our beautiful landscape we have here, our green waters, the modest nudis and all the creepy crawlies of the spring. AND SHE LOVED IT!

Well, I am not sure if she would do it ever again because the gear annoyed the shit out of her, especially the gloves. Few more times she would get used to them but unfortunately we didn’t have more time. But still we cherished the time together in my “underwater home”. And you know what, she even found a doto herself, a tiny white doto!

48F 12ft 48min 10-15ft viz

Buddy: Ege EE.