Scuba anyone?
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None of them mine of course
Harlequin Shrimp (about 1cm carapace)….
Mantis Shrimp, my favourite reef-thug. One of them hit my pointer stick yesterday and I felt the jolt, and the things are no more than 3" long….
Factoid (stolen from the web).....A mantis punch arrives with the acceleration of a . 22-caliber bullet, 50 times faster than a human eye can blink. Underwater, the low pressure bubble left in the wake of the punch collapses upon itself in a burst of light and heat, reaching an estimated 8,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
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I know that you didn’t take them but as someone who has ,at times,attempted underwater photography, I know how difficult it is. For starters the fish aren’t exactly posing, and your operating under water in a current. Add that to maintaining neutral buoyancy etc. And the list goes on.
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Badass shots! Mantis “shrimps” also have hyper spectral vision and independent eyes in addition to the cavitation bubble claw. Amazing creatures.
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independent eyes
I love watching them from above when they are in their burrows. Their eyes moving completely out of sync fascinates me…..
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Very nice. We've been a little disappointed with the number of divers here, basically if I have to look in front of me to make sure I am not going to hit a diver coming the other way, or when I look around, I can't immediately recognize my group, then it's not for me. We've decided that from now on we will try and find areas a little less travelled, or do liveaboards where we can get to remote places to cut the number of bodies in the water down…
Hands down, the best place we have dived is Socorro. It's hard to get to, but absolutely amazing (if you like big stuff).
We're looking at going to the Hallaniyat Islands in Oman as soon as we can. I know the islands from my fishing exploits, they are bursting with marine life and have a resident population of Humpback whales. And I believe, there is only one dive operation that goes there.....
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I'm going to be diving for the first time next month in Thailand. Doing the PADI Open Water course and possibly Advanced too, depending on how much time I have.
If anyone has dived in Thailand before, can you provide any recommendations for place to take these courses? As it stands I'm thinking Koh Lanta, as I only have two weeks in the country and it's location lines up with the rest of my itinerary, but I'm open to other suggestions.
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I'm going to be diving for the first time next month in Thailand. Doing the PADI Open Water course and possibly Advanced too, depending on how much time I have.
If anyone has dived in Thailand before, can you provide any recommendations for place to take these courses? As it stands I'm thinking Koh Lanta, as I only have two weeks in the country and it's location lines up with the rest of my itinerary, but I'm open to other suggestions.
Did my PADI Open Water there about 30 yrs ago. On Koh Tao, but the diving is much better in the Andaman Sea (where I went later, around Rai Leh, beautiful reefs and some wrecks) than in the Gulf. Agree with Giles, just do the OW and dive as much as you can.
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No experience of diving in Thailand I am afraid. But my strong recommendation is do your open water, then enjoy diving for a while. Then add advanced (and Nitrox if you think you will dive a lot) at a later date.
Thanks for the advice. I'm going to have roughly five days on the island, so this will probably suit me much better than trying to cram two courses into my short time there.
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My normal computer locked out for some reason a couple of days ago. I was not diving with it at the time, but nevertheless, when a dive computer locks out, it will not work for 24 or 48 hours. So I used my spare dive computer, which I am not used to. When Haid, the divemaster and I set it to Nitrox, we added a few other safety warnings, including deep stop. My spare is different from my primary, so I was not used to what it was telling me. I did not notice that I went into deco, but did see a 14 meter deep stop warning come up. I was cold and it was the last dive of the holiday, so thought, oh fuck it, the warning has only come on because we programmed it to be super-cautious and even if the computer locks because I ignore it, then it does not matter as I will not be using it again for months…...
Got to the normal 5m safety stop and did not believe the computer was telling me I had to do a 31 minute stop. So I timed 3 minutes with my normal watch, checked that Paula who I was diving with, had zero safety stop time left, and surfaced.
My computer was erroring so I showing to Haid. So he basically made me do the 31 minutes, not that I was arguing. I just felt really sorry for him, as hanging around for half an hour under the surface when you are cold is not a lot of fun and for Paula who was on the boat not really knowing what the hell was happening.......
