Preparing for the Rest of Your Life

My friend Mark came to visit this past weekend. Having been dive buddies in LA, Polynesia, and Cayman (that's the first time I've said the island's name on this blog, by the way - a momentous occasion to be sure), we decided to jump in and try out my strobe in California water for the first time and see if we could find anything interesting.

As it turns out, we had an excellent set of three dives along the outside of the Monterey Breakwater. This is a sunflower star, a many-armed type of sea star. This particular one was just sitting around taking it easy (it being Labor Day Weekend and all), but these guys can move really fast when they need to.

Speaking of slow, this is a rainbow star. These guys move at your more typical snail's pace (or slower - you might be surprised to learn how fast snails can move).

A Rainbow Nudibranch. We saw a few of these, and all were approximately 8-10 inches long, which is much bigger than the 2 inches of most nudibranchs we had seen in previous classes and dives.

Throughout our dive we had to keep watching where we were going because there were a bunch of sea nettles like this one floating around us. Neither of us were stung, fortunately, but we definitely had good incentive to keep our heads on a swivel. Fun fact: Just as geese come in gaggles and lions come in prides, so too do jellies come in smacks. Yes. We swam through a smack of jellies.

A shrimp on a bat star, which is incidentally the answer to my guess-the-animal quiz regarding the photo at the top of this webpage. Bat stars have porous scales over the outside of their bodies, through which they stick their gills to get a little more air. Because it's stuffy underwater.

This is an opalescent sea slug. We saw quite a few of these crawling across the sandy bottom. This species is the more common nudibranch size of 2 inches, but it certainly makes up for that in style.

This is a Sea Lemon Sea Slug. Whereas most of the previous pictures were taken in the kelp and sandy floor just offshore of land and out a little way from the jetty, this photo was taken on the rock jetty itself, where we found a few sea lemons scattered about.

This is one of my favorite photos from the dive because of what I didn't notice when I first took it. It was only when I uploaded the dive pictures onto my computer that I realized there was a shrimp sitting on the crab's head. Since then I have taken to calling this the "family portrait" because of the way it, the crab, and the neighboring anemone are all arranged and looking at the camera, plus the "shopping mall portrait studio" quality of the lighting. It's all wonderfully hokey and I like it.