Hawaiian Nudibranch
Here on the mountain we’ve had three and a half feet of snow and been without power for three days during the past week. Candlelight suppers aren’t all that bad though, and things are cool now.
I figure with the runoff and swell in the bay, diving sucks, so I’ll just tell you a little story. Have you ever been diving during an earthquake? Once, on the big island of Hawaii, my partner and I were trying to photograph different nudibranchs in 90 feet on an underwater lava ledge off the Kohala Coast. The visibility was great, but the sea slugs weren’t cooperating.
We were having difficulty finding them but doing our best, when we noticed that the visibility near the bottom had been reduced to about three feet. Weird? You bet, but we kept on looking. Other things had changed too, and the nudibranchs were suddenly everywhere. They were emerging from crevasses and were making tracks along the crusted lava, and we had our pick of photogenic animals to shoot. Famine had become feast, and we made the most of it. That was when your camera was loaded with real film though, so the photo orgy didn’t last all that long.
After finishing the dive and admiring all the other different creatures we would have liked to have recorded on film, we hiked back to the car and headed to Kohala Divers to have our tanks filled. That’s when we found out there had been a mild earthquake, about 4.0. That explained the reduction in visibility and the creatures crawling out of the cracks in the wall. Still, if no one had told us there’d been a quake we’d have never guessed.
It‘s hard to imagine what it would have been like underwater during a big one, and I won’t even think about a tsunami. In retrospect it was an interesting experience, one I magnified and used in my second book, Sunken Graves. If you’ve had a similar experience I’d love to hear about it, drop me an email.
New blog will be coming next week, and we’ll get back to talking about diving as long as the power doesn’t go out again. Think halibut hunting along the beach, it’s becoming that time of the year.