Maple Bay 13/01/2013

Greg, Shawn and Guy were doing some line work and skills at Maple Bay, and I joined them.

Guy lived right there in Maple Bay, which was very convenient for him! I had thought I had told them I was coming, but was mistaken when I arrived at the usual time to find them done their first dive. Oops. I checked and found that I had not actually told them I was coming!

Guy had some chores to do, so he could not do the second dive, but Shawn was good to go. Greg ended up doing three dives, as Shawn left after the second dive. It was great that Greg had enough gas and enough time, otherwise I'd be only doing one dive.

We worked on maintaining our position on the line, doing gas sharing practice on the line, and our regular drills. It was a lot of fun! Everything went pretty well. Greg did remind me to use my light more when signalling a problem, a bad habit I had developed. I tied off the line a few times, and had some practice running the reel too.

When Greg and I got out of the water on the last dive, we came across a Lewis Moon Snail out in the open in about 10 feet of water. I had only seen one of them before ever, and was pretty excited. Greg had no idea what it was, and had never seen one before. They were without doubt one of the ugliest creatures around, but kind of cool looking as well. They spend most of their time burrowing in the sand, so you rarely see them out. I had my camera, and thought I got a great bit of video, but when I checked later, I found that the camera had not been recording! Oops! Got to make sure that the lens cap isn't on!

At the very least, here is a picture someone else took of the creature, so you can see just how ugly it really is.

http://emeralddiving.com/images/Lewis%20Moonsnail.jpg

And farther down this page, you can read a little bit about it.

http://emeralddiving.com/id_snails.html