To celebrate one of my buddies 400th dive, we dove Dead Man's Reef in the morning and Shaw's in the afternoon. Dead Man's was gastly as it should be with visibility after we dropped in the 10-15 ft but with a cloud that made the pictures at 1/60s very green. However with an appropriate black & white filter I was able to produce some decent silouhettes. A few of the divers had lights and I managed to capture the rays of light. The dive itself was very cool, with a lot of Spanish Shawls of all sizes hanging out on the reef in the surge, making perfect macro subjects at 1/125s, forced flash and auto-macro. No use trying manual macro in the surge, automatic worked out fine. I guess I'm getting good at it, I managed with my new +1 mask to actually see my viewfinder and distinguish between a blurred focus and a sharp focus. Don't I love technology... On the way back, we followed the path of rocks from Dudley's coffin (don't ask) and ended up in the middle of a large school of fish. I started shooting some Spanish Shawls when a sea lion came play with us. I quickly turned off the flash and set my shutter speed to 1/60s but I forgot I was shooting macro... Anyway, the pictures that came out are definitely no piece of art...

Shaw's was very cloudy too, but more like sand-cloud-where-you-can't-see-your-fingers kind of cloudy. The surf had picked up but we managed to time it well and did not really noticed it. We dropped a little before the crevice but did not even try to go in as it was already white out way before the entrance. We followed the reef looking for small critters, found a couple of Spanish Shawls but far less than in Dead Man's, found a small shy eel and a fairly sized halibut that my buddy scarred away just as I was snatching the picture creating an interesting motion blur. Not a prize winner though...

Total bottom time 102 minutes, temperature dropped in the low 50s and the dry suit didn't leak. The bike tube patches actually seem to work.