Eagle eyes

It had been predicted to be a breezy weekend with the wind direction not being ideal for going for a dip.  However as I drove Steve home from the hospital after his last operation, which I might add he only just had done in time before they start to can elective surgery, I was watching the wind and my hopes lifted.  Getting back home I did the customary loop to check the water and it looked very snorkelable, and convinced Lisa it was worth trying:

With the way the world is going Lisa and I feel very lucky to live where we live.  A quiet out of the way place, no shops to attract the hoarders, and just a few minutes stroll from the beach.  So if we do have to go into lockdown and self-quarantine we can still wander to the beach, and keep a safe distance from anyone else.  We thought we would use today do a practise run and sure enough social distancing was easy to observe, as indicated by the image above:

There was plenty of life below the water.  Fish darting here and there, sea stars and urchins abound.  I was on the hunt and dove down checking under ledges, and found heaps of small colourful fish sadly all too skittish to take images of.  I did however manage one reasonable image (above) of a spectacular Fire Damsel.  At the bottom of the shot is also what I believe, due to the black spot by the tail, is a Four Lined Cardinalfish:

While ducking down trying to get images of all these little fish I noticed a sudden movement, and there plastered spreadeagled across the rock was an octopus.  It had been on the ground and had quickly retreated further under the ledge as I went down, but it hadn’t managed to find a big enough crevice to hide in before I took the image above.  The next time I went  down it had changed colour and was practically impossible to see:

My narrative seems to be one image behind today, no matter.  The fish above is the same one that I talked about in my last underwater post.  It hung about for a while but never stayed still and if I got too close would dart off until building up the courage to check us out again.  In the image I got you can’t see the two teeth, but a bit more of the body is visible.  Not that this detail has helped me identify it!  It also seems to have been in a bit of a scrap:

As we were hovering over the area where the octopus and the toothed and scrapping fish were Lisa started making a lot of noise.  She pointed in a direction and try as I might I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, check out the image above and see if you can spot why.  Below is a much clearer image of the reason for the well-deserved excitement.  This cuttlefish, which is the first one Lisa has seen, dipped down into the weed on first sight and my hopes of getting a good look faded:

However it came back up and cruised at a very leisurely pace over the weed before hiding under a ledge.  We bobbed up and down with the increasing waves being very patient and it emerged again and swam across an open area towards a larger ledge.  I waited a while to make sure Lisa had a good watch before I went down each time, just in case I had scared it away.  But I needn’t have worried and it didn’t seem too phased by me:

After going under the ledge the cuttlefish somehow disappeared and we weren’t able to see it again.  With the waves getting more choppy we decided it was time to headed back to shore.  Walking the short few minutes home we felt incredibly lucky with our finds, thanks to Lisa’s eagle eyes, and also for where we live.  The next two to six months are likely to be very strange, but at least we have a playground on our doorstep, assuming the weather doesn’t turn too quickly: