I buddied up with Kees, because I wanted to practice skills. I haven't done a training dive at night in a while, and it SHOWED! Thank you, Kees, for being patient with me. After playing with drills, we went over to the Honey Bear and looked to see if any of the octos were at home, but they weren't. I did find several fun nudibranchs, including several Tritonia festivas, and a Diaulula sandiegensis that was only about a half inch long. And I found, to my delight, TWO Pacific Tom Cod! Thank you, Janna, for the class that allowed me to identify them. I don't think Kees understood what the frantic light signal over a small, inoffensive little fish was all about.
In the water column, when you could see past the seals, were tons of shiner perch and tubesnouts, and among them, a scattering of . . . something ELSE. Whatever it was, it was about four or five inches long, very slender, dark grey-green or grey-blue, and had PINK or magenta on its sides, and it moved REALLY fast and didn't want to be in the light. Juvenile salmon? Is that possible?
Anyway, Peter teamed up with Max and Dave, and went for a critter-hunting photography dive, and they found all kinds of stuff. A little red octo (it's been a long time since I've seen one at Cove 2), a stubby squid, a bunch of gunnels, and a sculpin I can't definitively identify. Peter also saw the tom cod.
Good eyes to spot this guy:
But once he came out of hiding, he was very cute:
One of the bottle gunnels:
We declined the second dive, because I was soaking wet on my left arm (due to the never-to-be-sufficiently-condemned awful SiTech dry glove rings, coupled with an inadequately tight left wrist seal). But about a dozen people were getting ready for a later dunking. Not bad for a rainy night!
