Key Largo October 09 (Part 1)

The pictures on this page were shot during 14 dives out of Key Largo during October of 2009 with Horizon Divers, Bluewater Divers, and Ocean Divers. There were 8 shallow reef dives, 4 drift dives on the outer edge of the reef, and two deeper dives on the Spiegel Grove.

More pictures on Page 2

I take pictures for several reasons. To get a pretty picture, to help create a memory of the dives, and for coral, creature, and fish identification later. Also, it is a challenge to get close enough to a nervous model and frame the shot while you are moving, the model is moving, and trying to play with camera settings (even on a simple camera like mine). You loose colors as you go deeper. On a boat like the Spiegel only blues and greens are mainly left. Photoshop can recover a bit of yellow. My flash is not strong enough to illuminate a large area at distance so these pictures are mainly blue.

The first dives were on the City of Washington a shallow water wreck of a Norwegian freighter. It is from early 1900s in 20-40 ft of water.

There were large and small life. Lots of lobsters under the parts of the wreck.
Jawfish are a lot like blennies. The bury themselves when you approach. But if you are patient they will stick their heads back out. This is a yellow headed jawfish for obvious reasons.

There are nurse sharks

We were also accompanied for a while by a Goliath grouper in the 300 pound class

On the drift dives we were in deeper water, 45-75 ft. There are less large coral formations and more large barrel sponges.

Sometimes there will be a crab hiding inside

The Speigel Grove is a large naval ship sunk in 135 ft of water. The top decks where we dived were at 100 ft. There are frequently strong currents in the upper water column. So the boat ties to a buoy. You then pull yourself along a rope to the buoy and then down the rope holding the buoy. At about 50 ft the current starts to drop. We were able to swim around the wreck with no problem. At 90-100 ft diving air (as opposed to nitrox) we had to be careful with our NDL (No Dive Limits = time before deco required). Saw a large stingray on a lower deck but since I was about to run out of NDL, I had to head back up with no photos.

The flag flutters in the current just like there was a breeze.

Enough wreck pictures. Following on this page and page 2 are more wildlife. There are a couple kinds of scorpion fish.

There were a number of moon jellies around. Their tentacles are short so they are not a problem. Quite pretty in the light. Notice how the edge of the first one has missing chunks. That is because both sea turtles and spadefish like to eat them. A picture of a turtle eating a jelly is on page 2.

Continued on Page 2