Ok - I'll skip all the blabbering today. Instead I'll just give a nice little assortment of some of the absolutely incredible stuff we got to see just stepping off the beach and diving on Wakatobi's house reef.

Banded Sea Snake (Laticauda colubrina)

Blue-Spotted Ribbontail Ray (Taeniura lymma)

Crocodile Flathead (Cymbacephalus beauforti)

Lightning Flatworm (Pseudobiceros fulgor)

Spiny Porcelain Crab (Neopetrolisthes spinatus)

Twinspot (sometimes also Fu Manchu in the pet trade) Lionfish (Dendrochirus biocellatus)

I wish we had had another week that we could have spent just diving the house reef over and over. Perhaps next time!

- Bill

So before everyone gets tired of scuba photos (especially ones with bad blue color casts), I'll wrap this set up and we'll get back to some land based photography soon.

This school of fish sat right at the front of this coralhead where two channels split off to each side. At first, they blended right into the slope of the coralhead. Then as I knelt there getting set to take a photo, the school pulled in close to each other, then spread out, shifting and pulsing to maintain their prized position. It is fun for me to watch fish behavior - whether it be individuals or whole schools of fish. For underwater photography, I feel schools of fish like this fall into a kind of "landscape" photography while still being wildlife photography.

Though this photo is definitely over-exposed, I liked this one as a nice shot of the way the coral and structure is is Cozumel. Our general dive provide per day would be three dives (two morning and one afternoon) - with each dive becoming progressively shallower. The first dives would usually be in the 70-90 feet range, and sometimes would include swim-thrus. In some cases, these swim-thrus would include complete tunnels and other times it would be open like this. This particular set of formations were actually at a more shallow dive site, but some of the sites had formations right out by where the depth drops off into the deep blue. This is usually referred to as 'the wall'. There's something fun yet a bit nerve wracking about being exposed out on the edge of the wall with nothing but deep dark blue next to you - but I do always scan the blue to see if something cool might make a brief appearance there.

This shot was actually a surprise for me. I can recall Anya pointing out these two arrow crabs, but I didn't remember taking the photo, and it turned out to be a fairly nice one. These arrow crabs are cool little creatures. We saw more of them last year, but it was still nice to see a handful of them this year. Eventually I'm sure these guys will become macro subjects for me, but that'll have to be another dive trip.

Thanks for stopping by and checking out all the photos and dive stories from our trip to Cozumel this summer. I apologize for the blue color cast to most of the photos. Hopefully next time I'll do better at figuring out what I am doing wrong and come home with better photos.

- Bill