abichi

In the summer of 2018, I got certified to scuba dive and went to the bahamas. I took some pictures, which I am mostly just proud of because I was given the privilege to take them at all. They’re not great quality, but they’re fun.

The first is our scuba equipment. I really enjoyed learning and getting to use it all together.

We also stopped at an island in the Exuma Cays, here’s a panorama from that:

Here’s a selfie of me, I couldn’t see what the camera saw so I’m happy that you even see my face haha.

For places, I have some fun ones. One is from a shipwreck, the next from a tunnel I swam through at a coral reef, and then the last picture and video were my favorite. This last destination is the Blue Hole. At the time of year we were there, hundreds of sharks circle in and around the huge hole with a diameter of 100 ft and a depth of more than 200 feet. It was very surreal because they didn’t really do much else but swim, and there were so many.

The Animals

I’ve always been a marine fauna fan, so of course I got some animal pictures. First off is the barracuda, very scary looking, this (big) guy was chilling in the shadow of our boat, he was about 4-5 feet long, and very shiny. Lucky for me I’m bigger than nemo.

Then of course there’s the sea turtle

This one is a spiny lobster. It doesn’t look that big in the photo, but the antennas of this fella were at least 4 feet, with its body at about 3 feet long.

This looks like just some coral, but those little fuzzy things on the coral are actually worms. They’re commonly called christmas tree worms, can you guess why?

This fun camouflage expert is the pipefish. I watched as it slowly swam up to this coral (horizontal) and even more slowly rotated so it was vertical to match the coral. I knew it was trying to hide from me, and I could still see it, but I just let it think it won this time.

Videos

This first one is from my perspective in the blue hole.

This one is my personal favorite. One time we surfaced and there were tons of these tiny jellyfish, called thimble jellyfish. Their tentacles don’t extend past their dome, so it’s very hard to get stung by them. I booped the top and have no regrets.

A little more on jellyfish, they’re more lethal with longer tentacles. One night we went night diving, and our flashlights attracted some with longer tendrils. I only barely got one on my ear, but some decided not to wear their wetsuits - let’s just say swim trunks are not close to the body.

Here is a time lapse of the shark feed. It was frozen chum on a string, so you can see them swarm it. They didn’t bother us at all, so we just watched from about 50 feet away. It was awesome.

This last one is another kind of worm like the Christmas tree worms, except these look like fans. What I forgot to mention above, is that when these worms feel “dangerous” movement, they retract their tendrils into their shells.