On the 27th we went to Gilianio. I had gotten just a glimpse of a Thresher earlier that day at Monad, but no pictures. Gilianio went a long way towards making up for that. This would turn out to be another great dive.

I was diving 32% Nitrox. Maximum depth was 63 feet, average of 46 feet. Water temp was 84 degrees Farenheit. Visibility was 30-35 feet. We were in the water at 11AM on the nose. We were fighting a fairly strong current, nothing to bad, but it did eat into my air supply. I was out at 11:49 AM with only 500 psi left in my tank.

Very nice corals at Gilianio. As we swam towards the wall I looked down and saw a sea snake. I signalled Steve and our guide Je-ann. Steve shot some video and then we moved on to the edge of a shallow wall that descended down just over 60 feet. We kicked along the wall basically shooting whatever took our fancy. Je-ann tapped on his tank and seemed very excited. Steve also. I came over to take a look. Steve was shooting video of what appeared to be some kind of black sponge. I'm thinking to myself... "what is this and why are they acting like this". Must be something "good" I thought... "take a picture and find out later". So I took a picture... when we were back on the boat, I asked Steve, "what was that black thing ya'll were so excited about?" What I thought was just a black sponge turned out to be a frogfish! :-))

This was a really cool reef. I came across a cave that seemed to extend fairly far back. A little to constricted for penetration though. Just out from it was a fan coral growing up from the sea floor. Je-ann was pointing something out to Steve who began shooting video of it.

While they were focused on whatever it was they were looking at, I noticed a large jellyfish. I was always trying to get a good picture of a jellyfish. My camera seemed to have a hard time focusing on them and they usually seemed to just fade into the water. The shot here, I manipulated once I got back so that it's a little easier to see. It ends up looking like a night shot, even though it was taken in the middle of the day.

When Steve was finished they called me over. At first all I saw was coral.... then when I looked closer I saw it! A Pygmy Seahorse! Talk about adapted to it's environment. It looked like a piece of the coral that it was clinging too! I put my closeup lens on and then tried to maneuver for shot. Not easy to do in the current! I was working very hard not to crash into the fan :-)) After several attempts I managed to get a couple of shots that "seemed" acceptable.

I moved out of the way as Felimar, my guide from the first day at Monad came over. He was guiding a group from the Netherlands today. As one of the women lay on the bottom for stability in the current while trying to get a shot, out of the corner of my eye I saw a sea snake approaching.

The first thing I thought was "that's interesting". All the sea snakes I had seen had pretty much ignored people. This one seemed very "interested". Had I been looking at a land snake, like a water moccasin (a very posionous snake and common where I grew up) I would have considered this agressive. Again behaviour that I had not seen previously in a sea snake.

The snake stopped about six feet behind the woman and looked at her. I began trying to get Felimar's attention. He looked at me, I pointed, and about this time, the snake moved again, this time stopping right between the womans knees as she lay oblivious of the snake, spread-eagled on the bottom, focusing on getting a picture. Felimar began moving to slowly maneuver the woman out of the way, not wanting to excite the snake I think. All of a sudden the snake moved! I never realized just how fast they could swim. In a flash it had left swimming into the cave in the wall that I had seen earlier, which was about 15 feet away.

After that we began making our way back towards the boat, again shooting as we went anything that we found interesting. I finally got an interesting shot of a False Clown Anemonefish (very difficult to shoot clownfish, because of camera lag on my point and shoot).

Later when we were topside, Steve who had seen the snake about the same time I did and captured the whole thing on video, joked to the woman that it looked like it was getting ready to "bite her on the bum" :-)) or words to that effect We all agreed that we had never seen a sea snake act in that manner and it was very unusual!