DUP Specialty @ Sail Rock

DUP Specialty @ Sail Rock

As already mentioned in yesterday's post, today we would complete the Instructor Specialty training with a DUP dive. We started the day however with a Multilevel dive and there was some great visibility and it was a great reminder why Sail Rock is my favorite dive site in the Gulf of Thailand.

The pictures turned out so well that I had to post them, so here are some of today's selection.

During the Multilevel dive, it was almost as we were diving in fish soup in clear water and when you looked up, there was layer upon layer of different school of fish all the way up to the surface.

This picture is taken at around 28 meters depth and I hope it shows a little bit what I experienced.

During the second dive of the day, the actual DUP dive, Bruno spotted this jellyfish off the wall and I swam over and got some great pictures. As usual, there was small fish swimming around and inside the jelly, feeding off it. The interesting part however is that a bigger fish is trapped inside the jellyfish and is being consumed by said jelly. If you look closely you can see the tail of the fish sticking out a bit to the left in the middle of the picture, with the big shiny thing under the jelly's skin being the body of the trapped fish.

It was underwater animal galore today and we saw plenty of white eyed murray eels, this being one of them. Some of the divers on today's trip also spotted a giant murray eel. It turned out that we were deeper than the giant's murray location on the rock, hence we missed it.

There were also various sightings of small scale scorpion fishes, like this one, a real beauty, sitting on an outcropping rock, showing off it's pectoral fins.

Here's a family member of the previous small scale scorpion fish and I just like the way the lighting comes out in this picture and gives it a little bit more of a 'threatening' look. As if a scorpion fish needs it to start with.

It was absolute nudi branch galore today though! Identifying nudi branches is almost an art in itself.

Here's another unusual nudi branch to me, but today the rock seemed to be plastered with them! According to my research this is a Phyllidia ocellata (Phyllidiidae), a mouth full indeed!

Besides these two specialties, Gregory also did his Fish ID dive, instead of the DUP dive.

All in all a good days diving and now it's back to reality with an IDC and IDCS course coming up in just a few more days. Stay tuned for more info and updates.

Camille